Are Teen Girls as Sad as We Think?

As a former teen girl, I can say that my emotions fluctuated pretty regularly while growing up. At 13 I got my first period, at 15 my first boyfriend, and at 18 my first taste of adulthood in going off to college. All of that change was inevitably accompanied by a mixed bag of emotions: excitement, joy, confusion, embarrassment, fear, sadness. Pretty normal stuff, according to experts. In fact, starting to pick up on changing emotions and slowly learning to cope with them is all part of healthy emotional development, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.

In other words, teens feel deeply and frequent mood changes aren’t totally abnormal. But in recent years, the emotional pendulum has been swinging overwhelmingly in one direction, particularly for teen girls.

According to CDC data released in 2023, nearly three in five (57 percent) female US high schoolers felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021. This stat is roughly double that of males and represents a nearly 60 percent increase over the past 10 years. Nearly one in three (30 percent) females surveyed also seriously considered attempting suicide.

The surveys used in the CDC report didn’t ask about gender identity, so the data didn’t include statistics on transgender young adults. But a 2023 Trevor Project survey indicates that trans teens are facing even higher rates of sadness, with more than three in five transgender and nonbinary young people reporting experiencing symptoms of depression and nearly half of transgender and nonbinary youth seriously considering suicide in the past year.

The numbers are startling, and made me wonder: Had teen girls really gotten that much sadder since my teenage years? If so, why? And were we just researching the problem, or was anything being done to improve the outcomes?

A year after the shocking CDC research came out, I asked psychologists to weigh in on why this age group are so sad, and whether the needle has moved since the data was released. Then, I went straight to the source and talked to teen girls about what it really feels like to be them — and what support they wish they had access to.

Experts Featured in This Article:

Calvary D. Sampson, LPC, NCC, is a teen and adult therapist, and owner of Calvary De’Rosa Counseling and Consulting.

Lynn Saladino, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist and a member of PS’s mental health advisory board.

Kathleen Ethier, PhD, is the head of the CDC’s division of adolescent and school health program.

What Are Teen Girls Up Against?

The CDC stats and experts suggest a variety of factors have contributed to teen girls’ sadness, from environmental to developmental.

The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which is conducted every two years and surveys tens of thousands of teens across the country, tracks certain factors that can impact health, either negatively (sexual violence, unstable housing) or positively (school connectedness). And in 2021, the survey showed, teen girls were facing some difficult odds.

For instance, 14 percent of girls surveyed said they’d been forced to have sex (up from 11% in 2011); for lesbian, gay, or bisexual teens, that number rose to 20 percent.

Additionally, only 58 percent of young women reported feeling close to people at school, compared to 65 percent of young men. And while The Trevor Project survey didn’t ask about school connectedness exactly, it found that only about half of transgender and nonbinary young people said their school was gender-affirming; those who did reported lower rates of attempting suicide.

The pandemic only created more opportunities for isolation. “I think that when teen girls were at home, they didn’t get the opportunity to have a re-integration process with school, with their peers, and their community,” says Calvary D. Sampson, LPC. Instead they went from school to virtual home learning and then back to school, many without any formal support for social skills and fostering connection, she says. This may have exacerbated feelings of loneliness and depression.

Social media plays a tremendous role in the strain on teen girls too. Young people today face the unique burden of trying to navigate the still-relatively-new and ever-changing world of virtual communication — and for teen girls, social media can take an especially exacting toll.

The CDC data found that 20 percent of teen girls report being electronically bullied, compared to 11 percent of teen boys. (For LGBQ+ students, the number was 27 percent.)

Additionally, teen girls may tend to connect more strongly to negative messages they see online than positive ones, a phenomenon known as negativity bias, says Lynn Saladino, PsyD, a clinical psychologist and a member of PS’s mental health advisory board. For instance, research shows that social media use tends to increase body dissatisfaction in young women — and this 2022 study in the journal Body Image reports that this is true even when people are exposed to body positive content.

Dr. Saladino says this negativity bias can extend to other aspects of a young person’s life as well, from how many friends they have to how well they’re doing in school.

“You could have five great things and then you see one negative thing, and that’s what your mind is going to be attracted to,” she tells PS.

Finally, teenage Gen Z-ers may also be affected by the way their cusp-Millennial or Boomer parents view mental health and therapy, Sampson says. While teens often view therapy as a way to work through emotions in an unbiased space and strengthen their coping skills, their parents may see it as something negative, Sampson says. That can make teens feel guilty for wanting the help.

“A lot of times in sessions, teens will come in and talk about their experiences and how they feel, and they have been told that they shouldn’t feel sad because they have a roof over their head or they have loving parents,” Sampson adds. She says it’s an especially common dynamic in families of color, given the well-documented stigmatization of mental health care within these communities.

(Worth noting, Sampson adds: certain factors, including the transition in and out of the pandemic and the stigma around getting mental health help, could affect young men and women equally. But emotions like sadness and depression don’t always present the same in boys and girls — something the CDC data may not reflect. Boys’ “sadness” can look like anger or irritability, so it’s important to include them in mental health support efforts.)

What Do the Teen Girls Think?

Jocelyn and Addison Aquilino, 19 and 18, respectively, can attest to these pressures. It’s something they’ve talked about among their peers and fellow campers at the grief camp for kids and teens they’ve attended since losing their father to suicide in 2014.

“Social media plays a huge role in causing a lot of sadness,” Jocelyn tells PS. “You see these people’s lives, and they look like so much fun, and you’re just comparing yourself to something that isn’t even real.”

She also notes that the academic pressures placed upon girls feels so much greater than what boys experience. “It’s insane,” she tells PS. “We’re expected to work and do school and maintain these grades and do everything and not crack.”

For Addison, it’s maintaining specific beauty standards, not grades, that she feels most pressured by. “I don’t fit many of the beauty standards,” she tells PS. “So in elementary and middle school I was outcast, because I lost my dad. In high school, I was more of an outcast because I didn’t fit the mold.” And while she admits to knowing that the “perfect” girls she knows or sees online aren’t perfect either, they do tend to clump up together forming what seems to be impenetrable cliques. “For girls, like me, just seeing that and seeing how we see them as perfect is hard,” Addison admits.

Will the Teen Girls Be Alright?

Kathleen Ethier, PhD, head of the CDC’s division of adolescent and school health program offers up some hope. For the first time in a long time, she says, it feels like people are listening to what teen girls, and teens in general, have to say.

“I have never seen people rally to a cause quite in this way,” Dr. Ethier says, noting that she’s been flooded with requests from schools, administrators, and educational associations since the release of the 2021 data. “It feels to me like [for] people who work with young people [and] who work with schools, [addressing this problem is] at the top of their list in terms of priorities.”

She believes that the pandemic, despite exacerbating mental health outcomes, also made adults take the research more seriously. “Adults understood the impact of the pandemic on their own mental health and understood the impact of social isolation on their own mental health. And I think we were all very shook by schools being closed for extended periods of time. Parents saw the impact of that on their kids. And anyone who worked with young people saw what the pandemic was doing to folks,” Dr. Ethier says.

It also seems that teen girls themselves are equally as motivated to find resources and coping tools for what they’re going through.

For Addison, that meant choosing to enroll in a technical school, where her concentration is in the culinary arts. “I’ve found my group of people in that art. I think, like in camp, the smaller the group of people, the easier it is for everybody to know each other and for everybody to connect,” she tells PS.

“It’s so amazing to see [this generation] advocating for their needs, being serious about what matters to them,” Sampson says. When she has an initial consultation with new clients, more often than not, it’s the teen that initiated the conversation around going to therapy with their caregivers.

That said, Sampson also emphasizes that in order for teen girls and teens in general to come out OK on the other side of this mental health crisis — “it is super important for all of us to do our part in supporting them.”

How to Support Teen Girls

For starters, it’s important for parents not to give up, Dr. Saladino says. I know that sounds simple, but so often she says parents will feel discouraged or even satisfied with their teen’s “nothing is wrong” response. But she encourages parents to push through that. “Keep asking — it’s okay. They know that you care. And even if you get nothing from them, they know that you care.”

Also, consider your timing. “Are you only addressing [their mood] when the kid is in a tizzy about something?” Dr. Saladino asks. If so, consider bringing it up during a Saturday hangout with just the two of you.

You might also try modeling what it’s like to go through something difficult by letting them in on your own challenges. “Sometimes parents put this pressure on themselves to look like they have it all together,” Dr. Saladino says and that’s the message your kids can get too. “I think so much learning comes from parents knowing that it’s OK for them to be having a hard time — showing a child what it’s like to handle something difficult.”

And when it seems your child is really struggling to express themselves or just struggling mentally in general — bring in a third party and introduce them to the idea of a therapist or a mentor, someone other than yourself that they can talk to and confide in.

She also encourages parents to do the same. “Having a depressed daughter is so hard,” she says, as parents can feel so out of control and helpless. Talking to their own therapist can help process emotions like guilt and fear so that parents can show up as their most supportive selves for their kids.

Basically, a lot of conversation needs to be had. And not just with daughters — but also with sons, Dr. Ethier says: about their own mental health outcomes (35 percent of teen boys admitted to depressive symptoms in the 2021 data), but also about the ways in which they treat girls.

“What worries me is that we, we look at these numbers [around sexual violence], and we think about rightfully, girls who are experiencing incredible trauma. But it also puts it back on them that there’s something that they should be doing differently, and I think that that just compounds trauma. We have to be having a conversation with boys about the unacceptability of violence,” Dr. Ethier says.

Outside of the parental mitigators, there are tons of things schools can do to better support teen girls as well. The CDC has identified six primary school-based strategies that can help prevent mental health problems and promote positive behavioral and mental health of students, from increasing mental health literacy through curricula and using peer-led programming, to promoting mindfulness through class activities and providing psychosocial skills training and behavioral interventions to students, as well as relationship building programs for students staff and families.

“These are solvable problems,” Dr. Ethier tells PS. “There are things that we can do to make young people feel better, to create schools, and communities and families that support them and give them what they need and give them the power to move forward.”

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health and thoughts of suicide ideation, dial 988, which offers 24/7 call, text and chat access to trained crisis counselors who can help people experiencing suicidal, substance use, and/or mental health crisis, or any other kind of emotional distress.

Alexis Jones is the senior health and fitness editor at PS. Her passions and areas of expertise include women’s health and fitness, mental health, racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare, and chronic conditions. Prior to joining PS, she was the senior editor at Health magazine. Her other bylines can be found at Women’s Health, Prevention, Marie Claire, and more.