Data
The teen mental-health crisis by the numbers: trends by sex and age
June 28, 2026 · 4 min read
A “crisis” is a claim about change over time. So the honest question isn’t how many teenagers are struggling now; it’s whether that number has actually moved, and by how much. Here is what the data shows, matched by sex and age band so every comparison is apples to apples. The short version: the rise is real, it’s steepest among the youngest girls, and both sexes climbed, but in different ways.
The long arc: suicide deaths, 1975–2023
Every figure that follows is a child, which is the reason to read these numbers carefully rather than for effect. Suicide is the most concrete of the measures here, for a painful reason: a death is recorded, not self-reported, so the count can’t be inflated by shifting attitudes the way a survey can, and it reaches back decades further than any survey does. The shape it traces is not a straight line. Youth rates rose into the late 1980s, fell through the 1990s to a low around 2007, then climbed sharply for more than a decade before flattening around 2018–2021. That 2007 trough is the pivot nearly every analysis returns to (NCHS Data Brief 464).
The rise, matched by sex
| Suicide deaths per 100,000 | Window | Girls | Boys | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ages 10–14 | 2009 → 2019 | 0.9 → 2.0 | 1.6 → 3.1 | Health, US |
| Ages 15–19 | 2007 → 2015 | 2.4 → 5.1 | 10.8 → 14.2 | MMWR |
| All ages (age-adjusted) | 2001 → 2021 | 4.1 → 5.7 | 18.2 → 22.8 | DB 464 |
Each row compares the same age band over the same years for both sexes. The windows differ because each cell is drawn from the CDC product that vetted it: Health, United States for ages 10–14, CDC MMWR QuickStats for 15–19, and NCHS Data Brief 464 for the age-adjusted total. No comparison mixes years or age bands across the sexes.
Three things are true at once, and none of them cancels the others. Both sexes rose in every window. Boys sit roughly three to four times higher in absolute terms at every point; even among 10-to-14-year-olds, it’s 3.1 against 2.0. And girls rose faster in percentage terms, off a far lower base. The cleanest way to hold it: boys carry the higher absolute level, girls the steeper relative climb.
Depression and self-harm: a shorter record
Self-reported distress has only a reliable 15-year window, so there is no 40-year depression series to point to. Within that window, past-year major depressive episodes among 12-to-17-year-olds roughly doubled, from about 8% in 2009 to 16% in 2019, with girls running two to three times boys (29% versus 12% by 2021), per NSDUH. The same rise shows up even more sharply in emergency rooms: a 2017 study found self-harm visits among girls aged 10–14 nearly tripled between 2009 and 2015, while boys’ rates stayed flat.
The age gradient: younger over time
The increase concentrates in adolescents and skews younger as it goes. The largest relative jumps land in the youngest band, 10–14, led by girls, across suicide, self-harm, and the depression inflection alike. Young adults rose too, but later and less steeply. And the most recent data, 2021–2023, shows the youth curve flattening and in places dipping, so the accurate present tense is “plateaued at a high level,” not “still climbing.”
What the numbers do and don’t settle
The rise is real, not a measurement artifact. It is gendered in level more than direction: both sexes climbed, boys to a higher absolute rate, girls along a steeper relative slope, with the youngest girls moving most of all. And nearly every line bends around the same 2007–2012 window, which happens to overlap the arrival of the smartphone, though an overlap is not a cause. Why it rose is a separate, far more contested question.
Related: The Bridge Years — the parent guide on adolescent development and staying connected.
Related: Is the teen mental health crisis real, or are we just diagnosing it more? and What’s actually causing the teen mental health crisis?
From the essay: Read the full piece →
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