Depression and Suicide Is Rising Among Teens and Young Adults

Depression and suicide attempts are rising among young Americans especially girls. Here's what you can do if your teenager is depressed and thinking about suicide.

Life is tough for many U.S. high school students. The numbers are scary: 30 percent of girls and 14 percent of boys said they “seriously considered attempting suicide,” in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those figures drop in half for suicide attempts, but they’re still high.

A whopping 57 percent of girls and 29 percent of boys said they had “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.”    

One reason the report cited is a rising incidence of rape or violence from a sexual partner. Other data found that suicide rates for Americans aged 10 to 24 rose dramatically from 2007 through 2021.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Types of Depression

A separate report from the nonprofit Mental Health America found that more than 16 percent of Americans ages 12 to 17 said they had a major depressive episode during the past year, and 60 percent of youths with major depression did not receive any treatment.

In visits to college counselling centers, students reporting depression rose by 25 percent between 2010 and 2022.

In surveys that ask teens about self-hurting — cutting or burning their skin or banging their heads — about 17 percent say they do. Such behavior is a risk factor for suicide attempts.

Why are suicide rates on the rise?

One theory tracks the increase to the rise of social media and smartphones. Using two large U.S. surveys of eighth through 12th-graders, San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge, PhD, argued that depression symptoms rose year by year as smartphones spread.

It’s also true that the more time a child spends on a phone, the more likely he or she will report symptoms of depression. The same rule applies in studies of 19- to 32-year-olds.

In college counselling centers, students who reported they had social anxiety increased by 31 percent during the past decade. But it’s not clear whether depression and anxiety pushes people to use their smartphones or the phone use is hurting them — or both.  

Social isolation, loss of family members, and employment problems during the COVID-19 pandemic also added to anxiety and depression among young people.

Phone time is cutting into sleep

Some 60 percent of teens may be on their phone in the last hour of the day and typically sleep about that much less than teens who avoid phones at bedtime. Girls are especially more prone to depression when they miss sleep.

Poor sleep quality is a risk factor for depression and suicidal thinking, which in turn may be linked to disordered breathing, called sleep apnea, especially in overweight youth. It may be worth asking your child to take an at-home sleep test.

As a parent, you might worry most about teens who seem rebellious — such as taking drugs or flunking exams. But teens who skip sleep, don’t exercise, and spend a lot of time online are an “invisible risk group,” a study of more than 12,000 European teens reported.

More than 13 percent were depressed; nearly 6 percent attempted suicide.

What you can do

The best strategy for parents sounds like common sense but can be hard to accomplish:

• Promote in-person social activities
• Keep phones and laptops out of bed
• Encourage an alternative before-sleep ritual

Try hard to keep your child on a healthy diet that includes vegetables and fruit, as loss of appetite may be a red flag of suicidal thinking.

Make sure your teen has no access to guns or bottles of prescription drugs, especially painkillers and sleeping pills. Consider locking them up, along with any hard alcohol —even if you don’t think your child is in immediate danger. People sometimes act on a suicidal impulse within minutes or a day.

Get treatment quickly for a child who reports suicidal thinking, even if your child isn’t clearly depressed and doesn’t have a known mental health problem. Research suggests that people make suicide attempts even if they don’t have clear signs of diagnoses like depression, bipolar disease, or borderline personality.

If your child has a psychiatric diagnosis, treat the problem — but many experts say you still need to separately treat suicidal risk.

Specific treatments for suicide include:

• A safety plan
• Training in calming down the nervous system
• Cognitive behavioral therapy

If you think your child is in danger of becoming overwhelmed, you might direct her to the website nowmattersnow, which has videos from people who have overcome their suicidal thinking that have been shown to calm the impulse.

Ask your child to try to sleep. If he or she can’t sleep, a cold shower or having the child put his or her face in very cold water for 30 seconds can help.

Make sure he or she doesn’t make any big decisions. That includes downing a bottle of liquor or take pills.

Ask your child to make eye contact, even if it’s just to go out of the house and look at someone behind a cash register or participate in a video chat.

Eye contact seems to help, even if someone is looking at a stranger, notes clinical psychologist Ursula Whiteside.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: The Truth About Suicide