In February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a bombshell report: Nearly 3 in 5 U.S. teen girls—double the number of boys—felt “persistently sad or hopeless.” It's a dramatic increase from just a decade earlier. Teens reported more mental health challenges and experiences with violence, and 1 in 3 teen girls said they had seriously considered suicide.
Even before the pandemic, the numbers were trending in the wrong direction. According to a study in Pediatrics, from 2007–2016, emergency room visits for 5- to 17-year-olds rose 117 percent for anxiety disorders and 44 percent for mood disorders.
In the face of alarming statistics, two St. Louis–area practitioners are looking at possible solutions.
THE SOCIAL EFFECT
If you were to create two graphs, one showing the number of
