Teen Mental Health Crisis

May is mental health awareness month. And to contribute to our collective awareness of mental health, I want to discuss a current crisis. I honestly don’t use those words flippantly. The mental health of our preadolescent and teenage students in our country is in severe decline. I want to share with you some statistics that show this drastic decline and challenge us to rise as a community to support our most fragile groups.

In February 2023, the CDC released a shocking report about teenage suicide in America. Suicide rates reached an all-time high in 2018, and though there was a slight decline in the next couple of years, in 2021, rates jumped again to reach an all-time high. Of particular concern is the level of hopelessness among our younger generations. Just a few statistics from that report:

  • 60% of teenage girls reported feeling persistently hopeless in 2021
  • 1 in 3 teen girls had seriously considered suicide
  • 1 in 5 teen girls had experienced sexual violence in the past year.
  • 14% reported being forced to have sex. Please stop and ponder that number. Over 1 in 10 girls reported being sexually assaulted. Remember, the vast majority of sexual assaults go unreported. Also, boys are the perpetrators of these assaults. What is going on with our young men that this seems to be more of normal behavior and expectation for them?
  • In a global survey of over 400,000 teens, only 22% reported being close to their family. ​


When we see statistics like that, many want to jump to conclusions about the cause. Please don’t be too quick to blame COVID or social media. Most experts in this area say COVID was a stressor that split open cracks already well formed in our society. However, some fair blame can be directed toward smartphones, screens, and social media.

Jonothan Haidt, a psychologist, has begun publishing data that strongly implicates social media with the rise of anxiety and depression in teenagers, specifically teen girls. His work is extensive, and I would point you to this website for a deeper review. But, the most significant conclusion from his work is a definitive turn in mental health among our teenagers with the introduction of the front-facing camera on smartphones (we can now take endless selfies) and the rise of Instagram. These both happened around 2012. The data is obvious, and though Dr. Haidt has faced pushback on his data analysis (this is part of science), the skeptics need more stable ground in their arguments.

So, we can put some blame on screens and social media. But from my perspective as a therapist, we continue to mishandle this problem. Our first mistake has been that we adults have drowned ourselves in social media as adults. We could have been better examples. Our kids witness us scrolling, posting, and commenting as frequently or even more than they are engaged with their social media apps. Children learn from watching their parents. No child development expert would disagree with that statement. And we need to be honest. We have been bad examples. We should work on setting better boundaries with our use of social media. I would love for such a cultural movement to abandon social media so dramatically that the billions these companies are raking in from selling us as a product dries up. It is a bit of a pipe dream, but I can dream, can’t I?

Secondly, as parents, we have attempted to manage the phone, screen time, and social media through a punishment/reward system. My bias is that punishments/rewards as a primary form of parenting are ineffective. They can have short-term value, but there are far more effective ways to parent. We need to stop taking phones or relying on router parental controls as the sole means to manage our child’s screen time. Instead, we need to be having conversations about screen time. It starts with a relationship. Why does your kid like TikTok? What videos do they enjoy on social media? Do you watch them together? Do you have a relationship with your child outside of TV and other screens? Do you go on walks or eat meals without screens? Do you play games (not video games) together? If you want to read a classic about this kind of relational parenting, read Dr. Haim Ginott’s Between Parent and Child.

Let me suggest a bit more controversial source of this mental health crisis. GUNS. School shootings have significantly increased.* In the 1970s, there were approximately 60s deaths nationwide from school-related shooting incidents. We are currently on track to have over 400 school-related shooting deaths this decade. These numbers have only increased since the 1970s. Lockdown drills are common practice for all ages in public schools. Young elementary children know that lockdown drills are designed to keep them safe from an active shooter on their campus. Many express significant fears and anxiety, knowing this is a constant reality.

My wife is a public school teacher. If I had the time and space to explain the procedures, rules, and expectations they must keep in mind for these lockdown drills, it would overwhelm all of us. Teachers are evaluated in their handling of lockdown drills. During drills, people go around wiggling locked doors. Children hear what it will sound like if a gunman is walking the halls. This is practiced stress and trauma. Now look, we used to have fire drills in school. The fire alarm would go off, and we would celebrate a break from our work while we walked outside. But during those drills, we were not walking through simulated smoke, seeing fire trucks, or feeling the heat of an actual fire. But in gunman lockdown drills, children are pressed to “remain silent” so they are not heard, and then in the silence, a door is wiggled, attempted to open. For all children, this is stressful, but for a sensitive child, this repeated lived-out terror.

As I write this blog, I feel inclined to write a much longer blog about guns and mental health. That will come in July 2023. But let me say for this post that our cultural obsession with firearms harms us. The late game theorist Anatol Rapoport illustrated that conflict will always escalate in games where there must be a winner and loser (we call them zero-sum games). We are witnessing this before our very eyes. Exercising your right of gun ownership to keep an arsenal of weapons in your home only contributes to the cultural escalation of violence. Weaponry reduction and inviting whole communities into conversations for creating safe and peaceful spaces in our cities is the right direction.

Our children witness this escalation. They genuinely fear that their school is next. I fear that the school down the street is next. This is not a far-off problem we can dismiss as “their problem.” Our children see it, and their mental health is suffering.

So what do we need to do?

  1. We need to stop doubling down on solutions of the past. Stop saying this worked for me in my family or growing up. The world has fundamentally changed. It is time for new and creative solutions, even if they make us uncomfortable.
  2. Stop pointing fingers of blame. Instead, engage in dialogue with those in your community. Talk to people who look different from you, are in another generation than you, vote differently, and go to another church of faith. We are better united than divided.
  3. Connect with a young person. Love them. Please support them. Encourage them. Listen to them. Don’t worry about correcting or fixing it.
  4. If you want a Christian faith view of mental health. Check out this YouTube channel from The Hills Church. Pastor Rick Atchley is doing a multi-week series on mental health. It started a few weeks back, but all the messages are titled “Let’s Talk about Mental Health.”
  5. I did a podcast for The Hills Children and Youth Next Gen program on Mind Body connection and mental health. You can find that on this link.

Data from
*Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security, https://www.chds.us/sssc/charts-graphs/

Mental Health and Technology

The statistics are quite staggering. The rapid rise in depression, anxiety and suicide are evident when we look at changes of mental heaIth in the past 20 years.

  • Between 2009 and 2017 rates of depression among 14 to 17  year olds increase 60%
  • The suicide rate per 100,000 people has risen steadily from 11.75 in 2009 to  14.2 in 2018.
  • Suicide is now the 2nd leading cause of death for individuals aged 10-34
  • The suicide rate has increased 35% since 1999.
  • Nearly one-third of adolescents will meet the criteria for anxiety disorder before the age of 18.
  • Teens today are twice as likely to see a mental health professional than in the 1980s. 

We need to respond to these changes with careful evaluation and realistic adjustments. Technology is here to stay. We can’t throw out our iPhones and return to simpler forms of communication. We need to learn to adapt and help our youth develop adaptive skills. There is even some evidence that younger generations are already adapting and demonstrating better boundaries with technology that those much older. There is hope. 

There seems to be two significant factors that contribute to increased mood disorders when it comes to technology. 

1. Increased information and therefore social comparison.

Social media and the internet gives us access to vast amounts of information with easy access. This information can come so quickly that we struggle with processing and testing it truthfulness. This is an obvious problem with conspiracy theories that abound on the internet, but it is also a problem when we read of our neighbor’s party down the street. Seeing pictures of neighbors gathered together at an event that we were not invited to can lead to all manner of assumptions and reactions. Without social media we would not have even been aware of the gathering other than maybe seeing a few cars. Now we see their smiling faces and can’t help but think everybody has more fun and is more likable than ourselves. There is some information that it is better not to have. 

2. False sense of connection/relationship and limited use of social graces in expression.

Engaging in comments on a social media post gives us a false sense of having a true dialogue. We have to infer tone of voice and meaning of certain words without the facial expression behind them. Research shows that all of us are far more prone to type things that we would never say to someone’s face. These two limits on social interaction just lead to escalating conflicts. Rather than being more connected, we feel increasingly polarized. 

We can improve our management of technology and eventually our personal mental health if we learn to set some limits and change our use of technology. Here are just a few recommendations that might offer some help. 

Recommendations 
Set time limits on your use of social media and devices. All of the social media companies have admitted that they are designed to get and keep your attention so that you will keep scrolling and clicking. Take back your power over the app by setting clear time limits for your use. Notice your emotions as your scroll. The moment your shift into a negative space, stop. Leave the app. Allow yourself time to recover. Never reply to someone’s post in anger. Keep that off the internet.

Intentionally create opportunities for meaningful face to face contact. Remove technology from those spaces. Be present. Listen. Be vulnerable. Real face to face engagement is necessary for our overall health. 

Intentionally have times to quiet your mind. Meditate. Allow your mind to process all the information you are having to manage. Don’t feel pressured to make immediate decisions. You need at least 15 minutes of quiet a day. That is a minimum. 

Set boundaries around the people you engage on social media. You have the option to “hide” or even block certain individuals. Boundaries on social media apps can help you filter the type of information that is presented to you. Don’t let the social media companies be the filter. You take charge of filtering your own exposure.

That being said, engage with people that are diverse and different from you. If at all possible make those engagements personal and face to face. Don’t block or set limits to the point that you are only hearing and seeing a narrow part of the world. Social media has a way of funneling us that direction. The world is a beautiful place that you can only discover if you open yourself to its diversity of humanity. Do not engage across a distant screen where assumptions are easily made. Engage someone different from you in a real face-to-face relationship.