Why do teenaged girls have such low rates of suicide and drug death?

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| November 2025

Teenaged girls report much more sadness than boys or grownups. Yet girls are vastly safer from suicide and self-inflicted death. What are we missing here?

Thirty years ago, sociologist Meda Chesney-Lind deplored the “criminalization of girls’ survival strategies” by authorities who callously ignored violent and sexual abuses inflicted on girls, then forcefully stepped in to arrest and confine girls who ran away or “incorrigibly” defied their abusers.

Today’s bizarrely contradictory numbers warn that authorities who ignore widespread abuses and family troubles girls’ suffer are similarly “pathologizing girls’ survival strategies” by mischaracterizing girls’ understandable depression as a teenage “mental health crisis” justifying severe restrictions on teens, including bans and parental controls on vital social media use.

I’ve detailed Centers for Disease Control survey numbers showing how depressed girls from troubled families use social media to reduce their suicide attempts and self-harm. Independent numbers also indicate more serious survival strategies girls – and some boys as well – in difficult circumstances ignored by authorities use to avoid deadly outcomes. Of course, authorities and commentators then pathologize girls’ strategies rather than the conditions that caused them.

We’re getting the teenage “mental health crisis” all wrong – perhaps deliberately so

Among commentators’ many grotesque misrepresentations of suicide and drug overdose is their universal refusal to acknowledge and incorporate the vital fact that teens’ rates, especially for girls, are far below rates of supposedly stable grownups.

The following tables show the CDC’s latest, 2023, estimates of hospital emergency (ER) cases for self-inflicted injuries (self-harm and overdose overlap), along with tabulations of deaths in society from corresponding causes. Teen and parent ages of nearly equal population size are depicted so the numbers can be directly compared:

Female age 10-19

Hospital ER visits: 134,500 for self-harm, 114,300 for overdoses

Actual deaths in society: 724 suicides, 646 fatal drug overdoses

Male age 10-19

Hospital ER visits: 35,900 for self-harm, 66,300 for overdoses

Actual deaths in society: 1,913 suicides, 1,057 fatal drug overdoses

Female age 40-49

Hospital ER visits: 21,800 for self-harm, 114,700 for overdoses

Actual deaths in society: 1,787 suicides, 7,152 fatal drug overdoses

Male age 40-49

Hospital ER visits: 20,800 for self-harm, 240,600 for overdoses

Actual deaths in society: 6,156 suicides, 17,085 fatal drug overdoses

The ratio of self-harm hospital cases to deaths:

Girls age 10-19: 185 to 1

Boys age 10-19: 19 to 1

Women age 40-49: 12 to 1

Men age 40-49: 3 to 1

That is, girls give plenty of warning of distress before killing themselves. In contrast, boys and adult women provide little advance warning. Adult men? practically none.

The overdose ER-to-death pattern is also intriguing:

Girls age 10-19: 175 to 1

Boys age 10-19: 60 to 1

Women age 40-49: 16 to 1

Men age 40-49: 14 to 1

Girls have as many overdose ER cases as adult women, while boys have fewer and adult men the most. Yet, teens register very few deaths from overdoses in society. The adult ER pattern appears to reflect real trends toward more deadly drug abuse, while the teen pattern, especially for girls, reflects more of a warning flag.

One could argue that girls, like Suicidal Tendencies’ inept “Suicidal Failure,” are inclined to dramatic gestures but just aren’t good at killing themselves. However, the opposite is more plausible. We would expect that as inexperienced drug users, teenagers would be more likely than adults to lack physiological tolerance for drugs and to make fatal overdose mistakes.

This may be why supposedly “volatile” teen girls have few suicides and o.d. deaths

It seems likely that girls are far less likely to commit self-inflicted fatality because they are far more likely to seek help, both via greater social media connections and by more dramatic self-harm gestures to get attention and time to deal with their distress. The overdose and cutting harms girls choose are much more forgiving and treatable attention-getters than self-inflicted gunshots, hangings, or jumping off the Golden Gate that tend to win attention posthumously.

The “survival strategy” interpretation helps explain the apparent puzzle that social media use is connected with more depression and sadness among girls, and also with less suicide attempt and self-harm.

Naturally, top authorities and commentators simply fixate obsessively on social media use, exclude all factors related to parental abuses and family problems no matter how compelling, ban all mention of girls’ unexpectedly low rates of suicide and overdose death… and then complete their circular feedback loop by concluding that girls’ own social media use must be what causes their “mental illness” and ER cases.

This GIGO approach results in the pathologizing of girls’ survival strategies. I apologize in advance for the next posting, which will detail the mathematics of social-media versus parent-addiction causalities of both girls’ and boys’ mental health issues.