Teen Girls PATCHED

This is not to suggest that we turn back the clocks. The gains for girls and women have been long overdue, and frankly, there is still much work to be done. Instead, we have to recognize that progress comes with costs, and look for solutions. Long-term, it is about teaching the skills and providing them with the support they need to develop a healthy response to the pressures (and maybe reducing expectations).

teen girls

Young people in general need guidance in dealing with big questions and heavy topics. Far too many of the students I ask tell me they are uncomfortable talking about controversial or difficult things. As someone who openly talks about his own battles with mental illness in class, and who teaches psychology, I was able to get some kids to open up to me, to leave the door open to conversations about how they are doing. But the bitter polarization of our public discourse stifles those exploratory conversations teens and young adults have on difficult, adult topics. You know, of the kind that people wrestle with at that age? With a caring teacher and the right group of students, those conversations are possible in the classroom.

The repeated denigration that teenage girls experience due to their gender can exacerbate other risk factors, like genetics, socioeconomic status, family dynamics, and even teenage experimentation with drugs and alcohol. So maybe the best thing we can do for the mental health of teenage girls is simply take them seriously.

While all teens reported increasing mental health challenges, experiences of violence, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors, girls fared worse than boys across nearly all measures. The new report also confirms ongoing and extreme distress among teens who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning (LGBQ+).

Almost 60% of teen girls in the U.S. had depressive symptoms in the past year, according to new survey data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And nearly 1 in 3 said they'd seriously considered suicide. Radu Bighian/EyeEm via Getty Images hide caption

Adolescent girls across the country are facing record levels of violence, sadness and despair, according to new survey data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And teens who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, questioning and other non-heterosexual identities also experience high levels of violence and distress, the survey found.

"There is no question from this data [that] young people are telling us that they are in crisis," says Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC's Division of Adolescent and School Health. "And there is this growing wave of violence and trauma that's affecting young people, especially teen girls and LGBTQ+ youth."

While 11% of all teens reported facing sexual violence in the past year, 18% of girls and 22% of LGBTQ+ youth reported the same. Among racial and ethnic groups, American Indian or Alaska Native teens were the most likely to have faced sexual violence.

"That is just an overwhelming finding," she says. "So, not surprisingly, we're also seeing that almost 60% of teen girls had depressive symptoms in the past year, which is the highest level in a decade."

The report also found that 52% of teens identifying as LGBTQ+ experienced poor mental health in the past year, with 1 in 5 saying they had attempted suicide during that period of time. Among racial and ethnic groups Native American teens were the most likely to have attempted suicide in the year before, followed by Black youth, at 14%.

There's often a history of trauma among teens experiencing a mental health crisis, says Dr. Vera Feuer, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Northwell Health in Long Island, NY, who did not participate in the study.

However, there are a whole host of social and environmental factors driving the behaviors and mental health problems among teens, especially teen girls, says Dr. Stephanie Eken, a pediatrician and child and adolescent psychiatrist at Rogers Behavioral Health in Wisconsin, which also has a program for adolescent girls.

Girls "are starting puberty early, and we know that hormones certainly start to differentiate issues for females versus males," says Eken. "When we look at research studies, girls, when they start to hit puberty, start to have increasing rates of depression and anxiety. So there are the hormonal factors that we think could play a role."

"We see that for girls and their social networks, even when they're socializing, they are not socializing in person," she says. "They are socializing through their phone or through some type of device rather than in-person."

During the 1970s and 1980s, competition between women was seen as something that held women back. Unfortunately, this message seems to have been lost in the tsunami of media coverage about bodies, looks and social achievement. Research has found that social media encourages competition between girls, particularly around their physical appearance.

Adults can play a key role in encouraging girls to value other qualities, such as their artistic abilities or intelligence. Childhood can be a canvas for children to discover where their talents lie, which can be a source of great satisfaction in life.

Social media represents a unique form of human interaction that has taken on an outsize role in the lives of teens. This is magnified for teenage girls, for whom every social media interaction may feel consequential and potentially cataclysmic.

Awareness of how social media has the capacity to influence your feelings and mental health seems to help people keep some distance from their interactions on social media. Adults can help girls by discussing with them how social media influences their feelings, their self-perception and even their body image.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the impact of a 12-month multicomponent school-based obesity prevention program, Nutrition and Enjoyable Activity for Teen Girls among adolescent girls. DESIGN Group randomized controlled trial with 12-month follow-up. SETTING Twelve secondary schools in low-income communities in the Hunter and Central Coast regions of New South Wales, Australia. PARTICIPANTS Three hundred fifty-seven adolescent girls aged 12 to 14 years. INTERVENTION A multicomponent school-based intervention program tailored for adolescent girls. The intervention was based on social cognitive theory and included teacher professional development, enhanced school sport sessions, interactive seminars, nutrition workshops, lunch-time physical activity sessions, handbooks and pedometers for self-monitoring, parent newsletters, and text messaging for social support. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Body mass index (BMI, calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared), BMI z score, body fat percentage, physical activity, screen time, dietary intake, and self-esteem. RESULTS After 12 months, changes in BMI (adjusted mean difference, -0.19; 95% CI, -0.70 to 0.33), BMI z score (mean, -0.08; 95% CI, -0.20 to 0.04), and body fat percentage (mean, -1.09; 95% CI, -2.88 to 0.70) were in favor of the intervention, but they were not statistically different from those in the control group. Changes in screen time were statistically significant (mean, -30.67 min/d; 95% CI, -62.43 to -1.06), but there were no group by time effects for physical activity, dietary behavior, or self-esteem. CONCLUSIONS A school-based intervention tailored for adolescent girls from schools located in low-income communities did not significantly reduce BMI gain. However, changes in body composition were of a magnitude similar to previous studies and may be associated with clinically important health outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION anzctr.org.au Identifier: 12610000330044.

Is it just that teens became increasingly comfortable admitting to problems? No: Behaviors linked to depression such as self-harm, suicide attempts, and deaths by suicide also increased, especially among girls. For example, the CDC reported in 2017 that emergency-room admissions for self-harm among 10- to 14-year-old girls tripled between 2009 and 2015.

Even the alarming just-released CDC report did not go far enough. The report included three suggestions for improving teen mental health. One, providing more mental health services at schools, is indisputably needed.

What would it take to show that social media use was causing teen girls to become depressed and anxious? Social scientists generally move on from correlational studies to longitudinal studies and true experiments.

We find a positive and significant impact on girls but not on boys. Exploring the mechanism behind these effects, we show that HSI increases addictive Internet use and significantly decreases time spent sleeping, doing homework, and socializing with family and friends. Girls again power all these effects.

In sum, we found six quasi-experiments that looked at real-world outcomes in real-world settings when the arrival of Facebook or high-speed internet created large and sudden emergent network effects. All six found that when social life moves rapidly online, mental health declines, especially for girls. Not one study failed to find a harmful effect.

A big story last week was the partial release of the CDC\u2019s bi-annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which showed that most teen girls (57%) now say that they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness (up from 36% in 2011), and 30% of teen girls now say that they have seriously considered suicide (up from 19% in 2011). Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller. As I showed in my Feb. 16 Substack post, the big surprise in the CDC data is that COVID didn\u2019t have much effect on the overall trends, which just kept marching on as they have since around 2012. Teens were already socially distanced by 2019, which might explain why COVID restrictions added little to their rates of mental illness, on average. (Of course, many individuals suffered greatly). 041b061a72