The next story has to do with self harm and suicide.
So I wanted to just kind of provide a trigger warning considering the heavy
nature of what we're about to discuss.
Now, a devastating study just released by the Centers for Disease Control
found that teenage girls are experiencing record rates of depression,
violence and thoughts of suicide.
The CDC 's biennial Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which was given to 17,000
teenagers at public and private high schools across the United States in 2021,
found that nearly one in three adolescent girls seriously considered suicide
that year, representing an increase of 60% over the previous decade.
Now, before I get to more details about the findings of this study,
I just wanna note the researchers did not give reasons for why this is,
they didn't really explore reasons for why this is, so
any reasons that we might think of are just speculation ,of course.
But think about the year here, it's 2021, we're talking about teenage girls.
A lot of people were still at home, a lot of schools were still shut down,
students aren't able to socialize the way they would be able to if things weren't
shut down.
So, I think about that and the importance of socializing ,when you're young
especially, and I think that ,probably, played a role.
But ,again,
that's not what the study said cuz they didn't really give reasons for this.
Let me keep going.
>> I have theories on it too.
>> Yeah. >> And I'm sure you
guys will have theories on it cuz the numbers are gigantic and very unsettling.
So, let's give you the numbers and talk about it.
>> So 13% of the respondents said that they had attempted suicide
in the past year, while 7% of boys reported the same, and
57% of girls said they felt persistently sad or hopeless almost every day for
at least two weeks in a row, a possible indication of
the experience of depressive symptoms according to the CDC report.
The story, like, makes me wanna to cry.
It's so depressing.
>> Guys, context.
So first off, the numbers are skyrocketing.
Okay, so this is not normal.
Because sometimes you'll see a big number and go, I didn't know it was that and
and you'll find out that it was always that high.
You're like, wow, it's just something you didn't know.
Know, the numbers are growing by leaps and bounds.
>> Yes.
>> 13% of teenage girls didn't think about suicide, tried to commit suicide.
Thought about suicide is a different number, much larger.
We'll get to that too.
13%, that is gigantic.
That's unbelievable.
57% reporting persistently sad or hopeless.
That's a huge majority of teenage girls in this country.
That's like an enormous iceberg of an epidemic that nobody's talking about.
>> Yep.
>> Wow.
>> So, just a few more details here.
Kathleen Ethier who is the director of the CDC's Division of Adolescent and
School Health says that high rates of depression and suicidal ideation among
teenage girls was almost certainly linked to another finding in the survey,
which is that 14% of girls reported that they had been forced to have sex.
Which is actually an increase of 27% since the last time
the survey was taken back in 2019.
The rate of sexual assault was even higher among queer teenagers,
with 20% of them reporting that they had been forced to have sex.
Also rates of sexual violence more generally also increased
among girls from 15% in 2017 to 18% in 2021.
Right? So,
this graph kind of shows that increase.
And so there's a lot going on, right?
Again, even though this particular study doesn't give concrete reasons why
the adolescents are feeling this way, you got to take into account, I mean, Cenk
mentioned social media when we were at break, and I think that's also part of it.
There's been completely other different studies that looked into the impact of
social media on the mental health of adolescents, both girls and boys, but
think about the insane standards of beauty that's constantly depicted on social
media, how people tend to post the best side of their lives on social media,
which tends to make others think that their lives are just terrible because it's
not perfect and glossy like what they see on on Instagram or what have you.
>> Yeah.
So, I'm a big believer in that theory, but
I wanna give you one more fact cuz it leads to a second theory.
So, graphic five.
Among teenagers, the CDC identified as LGBQ+,
they left out the T and so they're not in the survey,
69% reported feeling persistent sadness for at least two weeks in a row,
22% of LGBQ+ adolescents said they had attempted suicide.
Wow, if you include transgender people, then the numbers will be even higher.
Probably, we don't know because it's not in the survey.
But we do know from other surveys that their numbers are the highest, right?
69%, 7 out of 10 feeling despondent,
22% tried suicide, again, gigantic epidemic.
It's unbelievable those numbers.
I mean, look, okay, so this gets the political part of it.
So, social media is not at all political and has a massive problem, and
some issues are political, some aren't, right?
But the politics of it, there's constant
attacks against LGBTQ people including LGBTQ kids, right?
Hey, you're not allowed to teach about gay people in school cuz they're so bad and
awful and terrible, right?
Transgender case, and guys the Right wing says the number one problem in America,
and they don't say necessarily number one, but they've been addressing it as if it's
the number one problem, is transgender girls on high school sports teams.
>> Number one issue.
>> Meanwhile, 22% of LGBQ kids are trying to commit suicide.
That is an enormous number of,
tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of kids.
That is such a bigger problem.
That's a monumentally bigger problem.
But nobody talks about it.
>> Right? No, you're absolutely right about that.
The other thing that I hadn't really considered,
in terms of like the context of adolescents and
what they're exposed to on a regular basis with social media,
is the pretty devastating violent content in the news.
Right? So, the viral videos,
the police brutality, all of that stuff that we tend to have to watch for
ourselves to be able to give you information about it on the show.
Are adolescents mentally equipped to deal with that kind of
brutal content every single day?
Because that was one of the things that was cited in the study.
As for the increase in depression and suicidal ideation,
they cited isolation and disruption experienced during the pandemic,
the flood of disturbing cases of racial injustice and police brutality.
I don't know what we can do in response to that,
to help them cope with these things mentally.
I can say as an adult, dealing with this kind of subject matter every single day
for my job, it takes a toll on you mentally.
I can't imagine what it's like for a teenager.
>> So, yes.
In that regard, we've done stories about screeners and moderators,
and you need those folks and that job needs to be done, but let's say you've,
let's call them screeners ,for lack of a better word, on Twitter.
Your job is to look at the worst part of humanity the entire day and
weed it out because if you don't, then there'll be child porn and and murder and
mayhem and all these horrible videos all over every social media platform.
So they have to hire tons and tons of people to go, yeah, no,
that one's not allowed, not allowed, not allowed.
And the ones that are not allowed are horrific.
If you ever saw one or two of them, it would make you sick to your stomach, and
they have to watch all of those.
Okay?
So now guys, that stuff's all over the internet, right?
You got the worst stuff that they're trying to block, but
they can't block it all, then you have the normal bad stuff.
So now the mental health of those folks is a disaster.
So, the reason I bring it up is if you watch that stuff all day,
your mental health deteriorates significantly.
Imagine what it does to all of us, right?
When we see, yeah, we see a fraction of what they see, right?
But that deteriorates our mental health to some degree, right?
So you've got that phenomenon.
By the way, why is sexual assault and rape for kids going up so much?
Well, there's what you want to call them Right wingers or whatever,
I'm trying not to make it political guys, but at the same time,
whatever label you want to attach to it, there are now influencers out there,
going, yeah, women, they t want it, you should do it.
>> No, it's a great point.
>> Right? >> No, no, that is a great point.
I hadn't even considered that, but the way that young girls and
women are talked about by these pick up artist types,
the Andrew Tate types, the way that women are disregarded, degraded,
yeah, I'm sure that that has an impact on an adolescents' mental health.
>> And that has two impacts.
One is, the sexual assaults are going massively up.
So it affects, potentially, the boys into doing it, right?
Because somebody's giving them permission.
Have you met a teenage boy, Right?
One, very open to influence, two, filled with hormones.
And so somebody comes and tells them, yeah, you should act on those hormones,
it's you're right, and they'll like it, right?
Does that mean every boy's gonna do it?
Of course not.
But does it mean a certain percentage will do it that wouldn't have done it?
Yes, and you see that in the numbers, right?
And then the second effect is, women also see it and they think,
wait, am I not worth anything?
And that begins to affect them.
There's been psychological studies on,
when you teach someone that they're inferior or bad in some ways,
unfortunately, a very high percentage begin to believe it, right?
And that leads to mental health problems for the girls.
So, and no one is addressing any of this.
>> Yeah. >> And
it's running rampant throughout the country now.
>> And it's really interesting because I've been talking more and
more about the crisis with young boys, and young men in the country.
Right? And
that's definitely reflected in the data as well.
Not only when it comes to depression, but when it comes to prime working age men,
we're like just not even wanting to work at all.
>> Yeah. >> Right?
>> There's seven million of them and they're depressed, they feel alienated,
they have no friends, no one in their social group.
There's something going on with our culture overall.
Because this is not a gendered issue.
Obviously it's impacting both genders here, and
the other thing that I was thinking about is, look, we talk often about
how the prevalence of mass shootings is a disgrace in this country,
the prevalence of school shootings is a disgrace in this country,
we just did a story today about MSU, Michigan State University, and
the mass shooting that occurred there last night.
Some of the victims had already been through a mass shooting,
had already survived a mass shooting.
Right? So how many of these students,
how many of these teenagers are like constantly terrified,
how many of them have experienced a mass shooting on their campus?
There's so many things in society that I think we talked about on a daily basis,
we talk about how we need solutions, but
all these things add up for kids, for teenagers.
>> 100 %.
So look, that leads to the last two parts of this.
So backing up what Anna says, first, I know my kids go through it, so
I'm sure almost all your kids go through it.
Now in school they're trained, remember you might all get murdered.
So we have to practice how to not get murdered when we go to school.
God forbid we should ever do anything about gun violence.
And and it's clearly caused by the guns, but
we're not gonna do anything about that.
So instead we're gonna teach our kids, even if you don't get shot,
you should be terrorized because you might get shot at any moment.
And, by the way, it's true.
And we do have to teach them that, but that hurts their mental health.
Right? >> Yeah.
>> Then you go back to social media that I mentioned at the beginning.
Guys, it's part of human nature that we compare ourselves to the people right
next to us.
And that's why the rich never really get satisfied cuz they
live in neighborhoods with other really rich people.
>> And they are competing with them.
>> They're competing.
And so they look at it and they go, well, my neighbors over there has got more, and
that guy has got more and his boat's bigger, right?
And poor people, the upside of that was,
poor people historically in human history were not that despondent.
Why, cuz they lived around other poor people.
And so they felt like, okay, we're in the same boat here.
But now, because of media, we're all in the same neighborhood.
So we're all looking at the richest people in the world,
the guys with the biggest boats, the biggest cars, this that and
the other thing, the best dresses, the best jewelry, right?
The best looking people, and comparing ourselves to them 24/7.
>> Yep.
>> And now all of us are going, I guess I'm not good enough.
>> 1000%.
>> And if you're an adult and you've already lived a whole life,
maybe you can cope with it.
It's tough, but you can cope with it.
But you layer on top of that, you're a young teenager,
it is 1000 times tougher to cope with it.
And so, I think that's the number one reason you're seeing these numbers.
and ,again, we have a miniscule problems.
If you even think there're problems, and their talked about 24/7 in national media,
we have this iceberg of a problem, and no one's even talking about,
let alone addressing it.
>> Yeah, you're absolutely right about that.