, Columnist
CDC Report on Teen Mental Health Is a Red Alert
The US is failing its young people, especially girls and LGBTQ kids.
The kids are not alright.
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Teens are struggling — and we’re not doing enough to help them. That’s the clear message from a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s biannual Youth Risk Behavior Survey offers a heartbreaking and, for parents, terrifying glimpse at the state of teens’ mental health, especially among teenage girls. The trend began before the pandemic but seemed to have been exacerbated by the isolation of the early Covid years.
The findings of the report are so striking that Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, which released the survey, was overwhelmed when she sat down to read it.