Sadness Among Teen Girls May Be Improving, C.D.C. Finds

A national survey found promising signs that key mental health measures for teens, especially girls, have improved since the depths of the pandemic.

In 2021, a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on teen mental health focused on a stark crisis: Nearly three in five teenage girls reported feeling persistent sadness, the highest rate in a decade.

But the newest iteration of the survey, distributed in 2023 to more than 20,000 high school students across the country, suggests that some of the despair seen at the height of the pandemic may be lessening.

Fifty-three percent of girls reported extreme depressive symptoms in 2023, down from 57 percent in 2021. For comparison, just 28 percent of teenage boys felt persistent sadness, about the same as in 2021.

Suicide risk among girls stayed roughly the same as the last survey. But Black students, who reported troubling increases in suicide attempts in 2021, reported significantly fewer attempts in 2023.

Still, the number of teens reporting persistent sadness in 2023 remained higher than at any point in the last decade aside from 2021. And around 65 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender high school students reported persistent hopelessness, compared with 31 percent of their cisgender or heterosexual peers. One in five L.G.B.T.Q. students reported attempting suicide in the past year.

“For young people, there is still a crisis in mental health,” said Kathleen Ethier, head of the C.D.C.’s adolescent and school health program. “But we’re also seeing some really important glimmers of hope.”