by RHITU CHATTERJEE
Adolescent girls across the country are facing record levels of violence, sadness and despair, according to new survey data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And teens who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, questioning and other non-heterosexual identities also experience high levels of violence and distress, the survey found.
“There is no question from this data [that] young people are telling us that they are in crisis,” says Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health. “And there is this growing wave of violence and trauma that’s affecting young people, especially teen girls and LGBTQ+ youth.”
Every two years, the CDC surveys 9th through 12th graders across the country about a range of health behaviors and experiences for a report titled, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. On Monday, it released the results from the most recent survey conducted in 2021, along with the trends over the past decade.
While 11% of all teens reported facing sexual violence in the past year, 18% of girls and 22% of LGBTQ+ youth reported the same. Among racial and ethnic groups, American Indian or Alaska Native teens were the most likely to have faced sexual violence.
And more than one in ten girls had been forced to have sex in their lifetime, says Ethier.
“That is just an overwhelming finding,” she says. “So, not surprisingly, we’re also seeing that almost 60% of teen girls had depressive symptoms in the past year, which is the highest level in a decade.”
Nearly one in three girls also reported seriously considering suicide in the past year – a 60% rise from a decade ago.
The report also found that 52% of teens identifying as LGBTQ+ experienced poor mental health in the past year, with 1 in 5 saying they had attempted suicide during that period of time. Among racial and ethnic groups Native American teens were the most likely to have attempted suicide in the year before, followed by Black youth, at 14%.
Trauma plays a role
There’s often a history of trauma among teens experiencing a mental health crisis, says Dr. Vera Feuer, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Northwell Health in Long Island, NY, who did not participate in the study.
“Most of the kids presenting to psychiatric emergency rooms and a lot of the kids presenting with suicidal thoughts do have a background that includes trauma,” she says, and that trauma often stems from,”some sort of victimization, sexual victimization, as well as bullying, cyber bullying.”
However, there are a whole host of social and environmental factors driving the behaviors and mental health problems among teens, especially teen girls, says Dr. Stephanie Eken, a pediatrician and child and adolescent psychiatrist at Rogers Behavioral Health in Wisconsin, which also has a program for adolescent girls.
One of those factors, she says, is early puberty.
Girls “are starting puberty early, and we know that hormones certainly start to differentiate issues for females versus males,” says Eken. “When we look at research studies, girls, when they start to hit puberty, start to have increasing rates of depression and anxiety. So there are the hormonal factors that we think could play a role.”
Social media also plays a major role, she adds.
“We see that for girls and their social networks, even when they’re socializing, they are not socializing in person,” she says. “They are socializing through their phone or through some type of device rather than in-person.”
But, she adds, adolescents in general, and girls in particular need in-person social contact.
The lack of it, she adds, has created higher levels of loneliness among teens, even before the pandemic. And loneliness is a well known risk factor for suicide.
Social media also exposes girls to all kinds of negative social pressures.
National Public Radio (NPR) for more