The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the mental health of young people in the United States

The coronavirus pandemic has had a serious impact on the mental health of teenage girls in the United States, with nearly 60% of them reporting lingering feelings of sadness or hopelessness, according to a government survey released Monday that reinforces previous data. .

Sexual violence, suicidal thoughts, suicidal behaviors and other mental health issues affected many teens regardless of race or ethnicity, but girls and young people from the LGBTQ community were most affected in most settings, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). More than 17,000 high school students across the country were surveyed during their fall 2021 classes.

In 30 years of collecting similar data, “we’ve never seen these kinds of devastating, consistent results,” said Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s School and Adolescent Health Division. “Young people are definitely telling us they are in crisis. The data is really telling us to act.

The study revealed that:

-Among girls, 30% said they had seriously considered suicide, double that among boys and almost 60% more than ten years ago.

-Almost 20% of girls reported having experienced rape or other types of sexual violence in the past year, which is also an increase from previous years.

-Nearly half of students in the LGBTQ community said they had seriously considered attempting suicide.

-More than a quarter of American Indians and Alaska Natives said they had seriously considered suicide, more than other races and ethnic groups.

– Persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness affected more than a third of teens of all races and ethnicities, and were up from previous years.

-Half of LGBTQ youth and nearly a third of Native American and Alaska Native youth reported poor mental health.

The results are similar to those found by previous surveys and reports, and many of the trends started before the coronavirus pandemic. But isolation, distance learning and increased use of social media during the pandemic have made things worse for many young people, mental health experts say.

The findings “reflect decades of mental health neglect, particularly for children,” said Mitch Prinstein, chief scientific officer of the American Psychological Association. “For decades, suicide has been the second or third leading cause of death among young people aged 10 to 24,” and attempts tend to be more common among girls, she added.

Prinstein said anxiety and depression tend to be more common in girls than boys, and the isolation caused by the pandemic may have exacerbated this.

Comprehensive reform is needed in how society handles mental health, Prinstein said. Schools should teach young people how to deal with stress and conflict, just as they teach them how to exercise to prevent physical illness, he added.

In low-income areas, where negative childhood experiences were high before the pandemic, the crisis has been compounded by shortages of school staff and mental health professionals, experts say.

School districts across the country have used federal pandemic money to hire more mental health specialists, if they can find them, but say they are stretched and students who need specialized care outside of school are often unable to get them because therapists are overworked and have long waiting lists.

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Associated Press writer Jocelyn Gecker in San Francisco contributed to this report.

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Lindsey Tanner is on Twitter as: @LindseyTanner.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.