Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| July 2026
Teenage girls abruptly cut their rates of sadness and depression by 70-80% by doing something the large majority do (hint: it’s not giving up TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat).
The Centers for Disease Control’s massive Youth Risk Behavior Survey shows an alarming 92% of 12th grade girls reported suffering poor mental health in the previous month: 56% occasionally or sometimes; 36% most or all of the time or always. 46% of these same high school girls report having been so sad or hopeless for 2 weeks at a time that they couldn’t get routine things done.
More bad news: the above figures were reported by my own select sample of 12th grade girls who should be happier because they earn grades high enough that nearly all will go to college (79% in my sample got A’s, 20% B’s, which I matched to the high school grades first-year college girls report having received). Girls with lower grades report worse mental health problems and few go to college.
No one asks how Gen Z girls who supposedly are so depressed muster the will to drag themselves out of bed, mope their way to school, get high grades, and take over colleges and professions by leaps and bounds, nor why their suicide rates are so low – far less troubling than those of supposedly less depressed boys’ or grownups’.
Authorities who are so-o-o-o concerned about girls’ mental health are surprisingly uninterested in anything beyond blaming social media.
Stranger developments follow
Nearly all girls with good grades like those in my sample enroll in college right out of high school. The average age of 12th graders in the CDC survey is 17.5, and of first-year college students in UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute survey is 18, just a few months older. A few nonconformists take a gap year, but nearly all high school graduates with good grades go straight to 2-year or 4-year college.
So, according to the dismal CDC survey numbers leading off this substack, colleges must be coping with hordes of miserably depressed first-year girls arriving from high schools, right?
Wrong. HERI’s massive annual survey (“The American Freshman”) of 2025’s entering first-year students finds just 14% of girls reporting occasional or frequent depression – well below the average depression incidence of US adults. That’s a consistent pattern over many years of surveys.
Boys’ trends are similar. Among 12th grade boys who earn A or B grades sufficient to go to college, 72% report suffering poor mental health occasionally to always in the previous 30 days, 18% of these frequently; and 24% report debilitating sadness. Among that same cohort of male first-year college students, however, just 7% report occasional or frequent depression.
What wondrous, cataclysmic change could be occurring in their lives?
It isn’t giving up social media. Social media use changes little from high school to college. Various studies, including HERI’s, find 63% of college students spend 2 or more hours and 32% spend 6 or more hours per day using social media, numbers similar to what Monitoring the Future and the CDC find for high school students.
Maybe college teens stop wearing Nike shoes, or, as Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary suggests (tongue in cheek), stop reading self-help books, items whose sales growth during the 2010s parallel schoolgirls’ rise in depression. Maybe it’s because fewer Republicans govern college towns: my own rigorous study showed more Republican office-holders closely correlates with higher teen suicide rates over time and by state (take a look at the astounding charts).
Correlationally, Nike, self-help book, and Republican office-holding trends are far better explanations than social media use, the official culprit, for teenagers’ poor mental health. Those who blame social media for youthful depression have to work hard to shoehorn the two developments and still find near-zero effects.
What does change for girls, then?
Let’s cut to the obvious answer: girls’ depression plummets as they leave their parents’ homes, where girls report on CDC surveys suffering widespread abuses and adverse adult behaviors solid analyses show heavily drive their poor mental health and sadness.
The massive decline in girls’ depression in the transition from home to college further evidences that abuses and troubles at home are the real causes of girls’ mental health problems, not social media use, not just “being female” or “being a teenager” or whatever ignorant prejudice some commentator invokes.
The differences are stark. High school girls who report no abuses at home on the CDC survey have very low rates of mental health troubles, sadness, and other risks, as previous substacks detail. That girls who escape household abuses when they go to college would report huge declines in depression fits perfectly with that finding.
I realize oblivious authorities and the press ignore girls’ abuses/adversities at home in order to wildly exaggerate both the zero-to-small effects of social media use and the nonexistent college mental health crises self-interested campus unions seeking more jobs and funding incessantly clarion decade after decade.
Do we as a nation genuinely want to reduce depression among teenagers? My cynical conclusion that authorities pursue popular exploitation, not difficult solutions, can be refuted by seeking stronger measures against family abuses and more investment in access to higher education and vo-techs as the major keys to improving teens’ mental health.