COMMENTARY: Our young people’s sadness, hopelessness and suicidal thoughts are a desperate cry for this attentive love in the midst of their existential and e...
Suicide, Depression, and a ‘Crisis of Hope’: Offering Real Help to Our Youth in Despair
COMMENTARY: Our young people’s sadness, hopelessness and suicidal thoughts are a desperate cry for this attentive love in the midst of their existential and ever-urgent questions.
Much of the media commentary on the numbers in the CDC’s report focused on what had changed for girls since 2011 that would lead to such harrowing trends. (photo: Thomas Andre Fure / Shutterstock)
Father Roger Landry CommentariesMay 2, 2023
On Feb. 13, the Centers for Disease Control published its biennial Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary and Trends Report for 2011-2021 and it showed the truly alarming, and rapidly worsening, situation of the mental and spiritual health of high school students in the United States.
The report documented that 42% of U.S. high school teens in 2021 said they felt persistently sad or hopeless, 22% seriously considered attempting suicide in the previous year, 18% had come up with a concrete plan on how they would end their life, and 10% percent actually tried to carry out that plan (and thankfully failed).
As worrisome as those numbers are, the breakdown between boys and girls was even more distressing. Fifty-seven percent of high school girls felt persistently sad or hopeless (compared to 29% of boys), 30% of girls seriously contemplated suicide in the previous year (14% of boys) and 24% (12% for boys) had a suicide plan.
And the rapid increase in persistent sadness and suicidal ideation among teenage girls is likewise startling: Since 2011, persistent sadness and hopelessness had grown from 36% to 57%, suicidal thoughts from 19% to 30%, and suicide plans from 15% to 24%, a 60% increase in each category in a decade. (Over the same span, chronic sadness among high school boys had grown from 21% to 29%, suicidal thoughts from 13%-14%, and suicidal plans from 11%-12%).
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