For the past several years, the conventional wisdom has been that teen mental health is in a downward spiral, sending us on a search for the causes of this deep dysfunction. But the conventional wisdom is wrong. According to the best measures we have, the mental health of American teenagers is not only not in free fall but has been steadily improving.
In June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published some shocking good news for anyone worrying about teen mental health. Between 2021 and 2025, the C.D.C. researchers reported, the annual proportion of teenagers arriving in the country’s emergency rooms for suspected suicide attempts fell more than 20 percent. That’s a big drop in just a handful of years. Among adolescent girls, about whom there has been so much anxiety and consternation, the fall was even higher. Another analysis shows that overall, except for a brief bump in 2021, the suicide rate for American 15- to 19-year-olds has been going down since 2018.
That these numbers have fallen from a recent peak isn’t exactly cause for raucous celebration: Though teen suicides are less common than they were in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they are still more common than they were in the early 2000s. Rates of diagnosed depression have been falling in recent years, according to data from the Children’s National Health Survey, but only modestly. And there’s a similar pattern for prescriptions of antidepressants for teens, according to Kao-Ping Chua, a health policy researcher at the University of Michigan: Fewer female teenagers are getting antidepressants than they were a few years ago, even if the drop isn’t huge, and the prescription rate for boys, too, has plateaued after an alarming upward trend at the peak of the pandemic emergency.
But over the last half-decade or so, the idea that there’s been a spiraling mental health crisis among teens has become has become so widely accepted we’ve moved on from freaking out about the pattern to debating its causes. One popular hypothesis, advanced by Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, is that the rise of smartphones has done most of the damage. Which makes it notable that during this same period, the standard measures tracked by the C.D.C. and the Department of Health and Human Services — in the Youth Risk Behavior Survey and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health — have been getting better. Discussing the survey’s results with my newsroom colleague Azeen Ghorayshi, Twenge herself called the improvements “very striking.” This isn’t just because of a brief pandemic rebound, either: According to Twenge, one of the great Cassandras of teen mental health in America, the current trajectory is now best described as a “longstanding trend in improvement.”
These measures aren’t perfectly reliable — some teenagers lie to researchers, others exaggerate, and even those answering earnestly are still doing so in ways that reflect not only their own mental health experience but also the broader diagnostic culture, which has changed over time as mental health issues grew destigmatized and services more widespread.
Still, because culture tends to change slowly and relatively subtly, the trends in the data are and pretty illuminating. And they paint a very clear picture: The percentages of teens reporting that they had considered suicide in the previous year, or told interviewers that they made a suicide plan or had actually attempted suicide, have all fallen by roughly 30 percent each since 2021.
These improvements echo many others elsewhere, with many of the most familiar measures of social health rapidly improving over the last few years as the country seems to have grown surer that it is on the wrong track. Homicide has fallen nearly 40 percent since 2021. School firearm incidents dropped 33 percent between 2023 and 2025. Deaths from drug overdose have dropped more than 30 percent since 2023. Across a wide range of indicators, the country as a whole seems to have the wind at its back for the first time since Covid hit, despite what your interpretive instincts might suggest, the apparent brokenness of our politics might imply or efforts to measure the national mood directly will tell you. What is perhaps most remarkable about this sudden burst of social improvement is that not all that much has changed, structurally, to explain any of these turnarounds — a subject I’ll write about more in the coming weeks.
With teen mental health, it’s not just suicide and suicidality that are showing positive signs. Researchers often focus on those numbers because they are among the easiest to measure, but they are far from comprehensive. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration report also shows a remarkably positive trend for teens reporting a major depressive episode in the last year, which fell 27.4 percent between 2021 and 2025. A more serious category of depression, major depressive episode with severe impairment, fell by roughly the same amount in that period. The number of adolescents reporting both a major depressive episode and substance use disorder fell further, with the agency reporting almost a 40 percent drop over just four years. And though the report began asking about anxiety only in 2024, those numbers fell in 2025, too — with the share of adolescents reporting a severe form of the disorder falling by almost 10 percent in a single year. According to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the share of teens reporting persistent sadness and hopelessness, which held relatively steady in the decades leading up to the pandemic, is now back down closer to previous levels.
Surely, those prepandemic levels aren’t ideal. Many people grew alarmed about the direction of change in those years. But as I’ve written before, there were probably some reasons to doubt many of those indicators, which may have reflected tweaks to health care coding and the impact of growing mental health awareness alongside any changes in underlying incidence.
Overall, the global pattern suggests steady or improving well-being for teenagers for several decades now, which has prompted some researchers to describe the apparent American declines in terms of “diagnostic inflation” and “concept creep.” It’s possible that over the last few years, therapeutic culture has moved somewhat in the other direction, with Americans now less likely to diagnose and self-diagnose than they were perhaps five years ago. Or that, as the emotional turbulence of the pandemic emergency has receded, the country has simply reached a new kind of equilibrium — one that extends to teenage mental health alongside other signs of social disarray.
Last January, I noticed that many of these tides were turning and wondered whether Trump might take advantage of them by claiming credit for the turnaround. That didn’t happen. But it isn’t just the midterm walloping that makes it feel a bit like Morning in America again.
The post The Kids May Not Be All Right, but They’re Getting Better appeared first on New York Times.
