American journalists, politicians, and interest groups left to right agree: It’s okay to lie about teens.

Mike Males | February 2023

Ninety-nine percent of the tens of thousands of news stories and commentaries on teenagers, suicide, and drug overdose lie. The willfully create a false impression.

UCLA Health is cruder than most, posting the flat lie that “suicide rates (are) highest among teens and young adults.” Other commentators are more subtle, dodging the disappointing truth about “rates” and instead reciting the scary-sounding but grossly misleading: “suicide is the third leading cause of death among teens.”

That’s meaningless. Of course an external cause like suicide, along with accidents and homicide, would be leading death categories for teens, since teens rarely die from major natural causes like heart disease or cancer.

It’s understandable that press reporters and the late comedian George Carlin might confuse “high rate” with “leading cause.” But it is astonishing that UCLA’s famed Child and Adolescent Psychiatry unit would be so ignorant and indifferent regarding basic suicide facts that such a mistake could remain posted.

In the 1980s, authorities caught psychiatric hospitals grossly sensationalizing suicide to scare parents into filling overbuilt hospitals with teenage patients. Of course, UCLA Health took down my complaint within hours – but left their false posting up. That’s typical of American attitudes. Lying about teens is ok; correcting lies is forbidden.

Look for yourself. Every article on “teen suicide” and most on drug abuse (especially fentanyl) contain the meaningless “leading cause” claim but universally omit the much more relevant, contextual fact that teenage rates of suicide and overdose are much lower than adults’ rates.

Table 1 details the important and most recent statistics no one else will present. It combines high-schoolers with higher-risk 18-19 year-olds and includes only immediate, not chronic, deaths.

Even with these conservatisms, adults of ages to be parents to teenagers are twice as likely as teenagers to commit suicide, 7.5 times more likely to fatally overdose on drugs, including 6 times more likely for fentanyl, and 15 times more likely to fatally binge-drink. Teens comprise 13.4% of the teen-adult population but account for only 5.6% of suicides, 1.5% of drug overdoses, 1.8% of fentanyl deaths, and 1.1% of binge-drinking deaths.

Not only do commentators omit these crucial realities omitted from discussion, they peddle exactly the opposite impression that teens are riskier than adults. This blatant misrepresentation contains more cruelty than concern. Teenagers who suffer at-risk parents are afforded no attention, sympathy or official help. No one advises teens on administering Narcan to parents who overdose on fentanyl – a family crisis eight times more likely than a high-schooler overdosing.

Major interests evade high adult rates of suicide and overdose, especially among White middle-aged men, because mental disturbances and addiction are deeply stigmatized in American culture, especially by medical and psychological authorities. The American prejudice is to pretend suicide and drugs afflict only powerless groups, like youth.

These unreasoning bigotries hamper reasoned solutions to America’s social crises, evident in staggering suicide and overdose tolls. We should learn why supposedly “impulsive” teens have such low rates of suicide, not inventing bogus measures to scapegoat them.

Table 1. Deaths from suicides and suicide-suspected deaths, drug and fentanyl overdose, and alcohol overdose, average annual rates per 100,000 population by age group, 2020-2022 (provisional).

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2023.

Schools Squander Imperative

By Adam Fletcher | January 2023

Schools are struggling, to say the least. By their own report, the US Department of Education paints a damning picture of the inability of educators and school leaders to recapture and re-institute the “good ol’ days” before the pandemic. Stories I have heard directly from teachers on the ground confirm this reality.

However, all of these researchers and educators painting this bleak picture are the problem itself. Instead of taking responsibility for their own failures, educators are repeatedly pointing their fingers at students. According to one post-pandemic summary from July 2022, student misconduct, rowdiness outside of the classroom, acts of disrespect towards teachers and staff, and prohibited use of electronic devices are all indicators of negative student behavior that define student engagement and student success in schools.

Viewing students—as the problem, not as the solution—is demeaning, deceiving, and ultimately irresponsible. It dismisses the imperative presented to educators after the pandemic, which plainly demanded that schools wholly re-envision learning, teaching and leadership throughout education.

During remote learning, many students became authentically empowered for the first time in school. Suddenly, they were able to decide for themselves whether they wanted to turn their cameras on, if they wanted to show their interest by answering questions, and what their own best modalities for learning were, in-person or online. Without the lingering physical dominance of teachers standing above them, many students chose to disengage at will, leaving the frame of their cameras to remain unseen or simply not showing up at all.

Some would argue that this was a false choice at best, but I disagree. In pre-pandemic schools, it was a luxury to leave school and believe you’ll succeed without a great deal of privilege and money. During the pandemic students had a lot of leeway despite their socio-economic standing. Schools are striving to re-assert their authority after the pandemic to the detriment of students of color, low-income students, and neurodivergent learners everywhere.

The “negative student behavior” described by research I mentioned shows what happens when you take a person who has tasted freedom and confine them again. They become disruptive, they don’t act according to rules, they lose respect for people who don’t respect them, and they use the devices that liberated them from the confines of small thinking, finite learning, and insufferable testing. In other words, they act in ways educators don’t approve of.

Instead of forcing conformity and demanding compliance, schools could seize this moment by embracing authentic student engagement, which happens when students have agency in learning. That can mean students determining the things they want to learn, utilizing the learning methods that work for them, identifying how well they learn given subjects, making cross-curricular connections according to their own interests, and following their passions.

The pandemic got schools en masse closer to that reality than ever before. Unfortunately, we are squandering the imperative demanded by students by trying to force them back into the boxes they emerged from during that time. Hopefully this won’t require another pandemic to change.

You can read “More than 80 Percent of U.S. Public Schools Report Pandemic Has Negatively Impacted Student Behavior and Socio-Emotional Development” from the National Center for Education Statistics at the US Department of Education here.