Addressing the Youth Mental Health Crisis: Adults Need to Look Inward

Beginning in 2021, CANN’s blog has highlighted various aspects of public health particularly impacting families. It is in this vein of love, recognizing inequity affecting Black and Brown families, and in support of a more robust public policy environment, we continue this effort in 2023 with this week’s blog.

Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its Youth Risk Behavior Survey with findings from surveys collected from 2021. As of this writing, the data from this report has not yet been updated in the CDC’s dashboard but should be included shortly. The survey, voluntarily distributed, though incentivized by federal grant dollars, seeks to measure various aspects of youth health, including sexual behavior, substance use, experiences with violence, mental health and suicidality, and – as of this year – include data on “school connectedness”, “parental monitoring”, and “unstable housing”. The findings of these surveys help inform federal spending and program designs, shift priorities and resources to better address a whole spectrum of health needs youth are facing across the country today. The survey “provides data representative of 9th through 12th grade students in public and private schools in the United States.” The survey’s findings also tend to shine a light on areas we’re failing youth across the country.

In particular highlight, the report begins with a notation that, despite a decrease in students who report being bullied, “almost all other indicators of health and well-being including protective sexual behaviors (i.e., condom use, sexually transmitted disease (STD) testing, and HIV testing), experiences of violence, mental health, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors worsened significantly.” Particularly, youth mental health over the last ten years has been in decline. These measures of struggle are not uniform and some youth are struggling more than others. Findings include nearly 30% of girls having consumed alcohol in the last 30 days, almost 20% of girls experienced some form of sexual violence by anyone in the last year, 14% have ever been raped, 60% of girls experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year, and 25% made a suicide plan.

The report uses the phrase “forced to have sex” in order to encompass coercive control and abuse as well as being physically forced. As an editorial choice and ethical priority, CANN will always refer to any means of “forced sex” as “rape”.

Similarly, LGBTQ youth were significantly more likely to experience all forms of violence, close to 70% of LGBTQ youth expressed persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year, and more than 25% of LGBTQ youth attempted suicide during the year.

An interesting finding, and extremely noteworthy in an environment of racist tropes, white students were more likely than their Black and Asian peers to ever have used illicit substances, with specific findings that Black youth were least likely among their peers to drink alcohol. Also, while Black students were less likely than any of their peers to report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, Black youth were more likely than any of their peers to have attempted suicide.

Of new metrics, data showed American Indian or Alaska Native, Black, and LGBTQ students were more likely to experience housing instability than their otherwise situated peers. Parental monitoring, or students reporting their parents knew where they were and who they were with, were consistent across all demographics and were sufficiently high. An indication that parental involvement, in the aggregate, is not a particular cause for concern.

The dramatic increase persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, serious consideration of suicide, and attempted suicide among girls coincides with increases in sexual violence and being afraid to go to school.

In response to these findings making national news, TIME published a piece by professor of psychology at San Diego State University, Jean M. Twenge, which placed the responsibility for these declining metrics of youth health squarely on the shoulders of social media. Included in the piece, Twenge suggested raising the minimum allowable age for a user to create an account to 16, which Senator Josh Hawley took up enthusiastically, having quickly introduced legislation to do just that. But the findings that parents are generally tapped into what their kids are up to stands at odds with the idea that social media alone is the issue. Social media, after all, is merely a vehicle for information (even if that vehicle is sometimes steered). The call rings strikingly familiar to efforts to censor libraries, being driven by right-wing advocates. Indeed, in Florida, those same groups are calling on the state to withdraw from participating in the CDC’s survey entirely, framing the content of the questions as a means of “exposing children to sexually explicit ideas”.

Florida already stated intent to withdraw from participating in the survey last year, though notice appears to not have actually been sent. The Florida Parent Teacher Association joined calls from other advocacy organizations pleading with the state to continue participation in the survey, saying the data gathered properly informed the state, schools, and parents where to focus their efforts in working to protect youth mental health. Duval County Superintendent, Dr. Diana Greene, said of the development, “We know we are serving multiple students as young as middle school who are already moms and dads. Even though this survey is going away, we will do our best to remain attentive to the experiences and behaviors of our students and continue to work with community partners to address their needs.”

Earlier this month, Michigan State University became the site of yet another mass shooting. One survivor of that shooting, Jackie Matthews, also happens to be a survivor of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting.

For months, national and international media played well to keep the team sport of debating who is the “real” abuser in a high-profile defamation trial aimed at silencing a person from speaking about their own experiences with domestic violence and abuse. Even if you do say something, the powerful can sue you into regretting it.

And in Missouri, on February 15th, state Representative Mike Hopkins stated on the Missouri House floor that “We are under no obligation to be kind to one another and students are under no obligation either…kids don’t have a right to be treated kindly.” The bill, which later passed, up for debate at the time, expressly carves out an exception to the state’s nondiscrimination law in order to make it favorable for teachers and students to refuse to call a student by their preferred name. This came after testimony from transgender advocates and survivors of domestic abuse, who wished to be addressed by a different name than their legal one.

In all of this, social media isn’t the issue.

Rather, the content of social media and exposure to that content and consequence of that content appears to be a space worth investigating. In newsfeeds filled with vitriol, hyper-partisan gamesmanship, tribally driven personal attacks, a sheer detachment from reality in the case of the 2020 election, and increased exposure to violence as an acceptable answer to conflict dominate our political rhetoric, social conversation, and now our standards for policymaking.

Teenagers are more and more likely to have survived a school shooting, more and more likely to have peers who identify as queer and who are facing being ripped from their families by weaponized administrative processes – declaring their parents’ loving acceptance as some form of child abuse, and caustic contrarianism is firmly driving the adults who benefit from punditry, book sales, and even government office to continue to vigorously pursue a more and more polarized environment.

Social media did not create these things. It merely exposed us to them.

The most affected by these failures are the ones least powerful to affect change. As children, and for good reasons, they cannot vote when their elected representatives refuse to address the most pressing issues in their lives. They cannot vote for voices which represent their own ideas to problem solving. And without adults willing to take a serious look into their own behaviors and adjust for their sake of these children’s lives, kids don’t have a whole lot of hope of things improving for them.

In order to address the youth mental health crisis in this country, we must first start with the most powerful adults in this country taking some meaningful responsibility, changing their approach toward marginalized communities, actually listening to kids when their ideas are well-thought our and their pain tangible, and remembering that we are all very much entitled to kindness.