Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| April 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n What a difference a few years makes in the lunatic crusade against teenagers and social media. The evolution of today\u2019s panic is disgraceful. Let me recount it.<\/p>\n Back in the halcyon long-ago yore of 2021, the CDC\u2019s biannual\u00a0Youth Risk Behavior Survey<\/a>\u00a0asked its thousands of 13-18-year-old subjects\u00a0for the first time<\/em>\u00a0about parents\u2019 emotional and violent abuses.<\/p>\n Gee, could getting beaten, kicked, degraded, etc., by grownups in their homes (the CDC was too polite to add shot, stabbed, and raped) have\u00a0anything to do<\/em>\u00a0with the teenage \u201cmental health crisis\u201d experts were proclaiming? Ya think?<\/p>\n The\u00a0results<\/a>, hardly surprising, were staggering. Teens reported powerful connections between parental abuses and teenagers\u2019 poor mental health, suicide attempts, self-harm, and serious risks that dwarfed all other factors combined.<\/p>\n The more honest CDC led off its 2021 survey\u00a0press release<\/a>\u00a0(now\u00a0archived<\/a>\u00a0and harder to find) with the following:<\/p>\nA brief history of how the Centers for Disease Control got the memo: No more honest science; ignore real troubles in teens\u2019 lives; just join the stampede to blame \u201csocial media.\u201d<\/h6>\n
New CDC analyses, published today, shine additional light on the mental health of U.S. high school students\u2026 including a disproportionate level of threats that some students experienced\u2026<\/h4>\n