By Dr. Doug Newton
A study from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) this week revealed some alarming statistics about the rapidly declining mental health of teenage girls, stating that nearly 3 in 5 U.S. teen girls felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021. This represents almost a 60% increase and the highest level reported over the past decade. The study also stated that today’s teen girls are experiencing record high levels of violence, sadness, and suicide risk. 30% of teenage girls said they considered suicide, up nearly 60% over the past 10 years. In large part, this increase is credited to the pandemic and the isolation and disruption it caused, but other studies have shown that rates of depression in teens have also spiked due to the increased usage of social media.
I started my career as a psychiatrist almost 15 years ago, specializing in child and adolescent mental and behavioral health. After treating thousands of patients and working for a variety of mental health systems and providers, I joined SonderMind, a mental and behavioral health provider focused on improving mental health access, utilization, and outcomes, as its first Chief Medical Officer. Over the last two decades, I’ve developed a particular interest in the concept of adolescent loneliness and its impact on our children’s mental health, specifically their anxiety and depression.
If you take the basic understanding of loneliness and apply it to the past few years of the pandemic and isolation, we have all felt lonely in some way or another. However, our children, who are naturally very social creatures and are supposed to use their teenage years to connect with others, have felt the negative effects of isolation more than anyone. While they’ve stayed connected with each other on social media and may think that is sufficient for social contact, studies have found that social media actually makes the effects of loneliness even worse. In a study in the Journal of Adolescence, researchers found that the psychological well-being of adolescents worldwide began to decline after 2012, in conjunction with the rise of smartphone access and increased internet use. According to a 2021 study from Common Sense Media and the Hope Lab, 21% of youth with moderate to severe depressive symptoms used social media “almost constantly”; today, this number has reached an alarming 34 percent of teenagers with these symptoms. What they think is connecting them with their peers may actually be making them feel more isolated and depressed.
As parents, all of these recent statistics are all incredibly frightening and can make you feel helpless. However, after years of treating teens with anxiety and depression and having kids of my own, there are a few things that I recommend parents do if they are worried about their teenager and want to support them and help them thrive:
Be a good listener: We may think we are better at this with our teens than we actually are. Be purposeful about listening to them and being comfortable with the silence. Silence can be incredibly important when trying to connect with your teenager and fully understand what they are going through. They themselves may not know how to vocalize their feelings and may take time to open up, so the more listening you can do, instead of speaking for them or jumping to assumptions, the better.
Help your teen feel less alone by being open and honest about your own mental health struggles and insecurities. If you have a teen, you know they often don’t want to listen to you and take your advice. So instead, model positive behavior in regards to your mental health. Talk to them about how your therapy appointment went or the effect your morning meditation had on your day. Ask them to go on a walk with you to clear your heads. Modeling positive mental wellness habits can encourage your child to engage in them as well.
Help them evaluate how they use social media: It’s not necessarily just the amount of time teens spend on social media, but how they are using it, that is the real problem. Ask your teenager what they tend to do and look at on social media. Are they connecting with friends or strangers? Are they looking at tutorials for creating things or at heavily edited pictures of influencers that can make them feel self conscious about their own looks? Ask them how they feel emotionally when they are on social media– are they happy? Bored? Lonely? Anxious? Ask them when they tend to feel the need to go on social media. Do they use it as a distraction from what’s going on in their lives or because they have some free time in their day? Identifying the answers to these questions will help you and your teen get an idea of how they use social media in their daily lives and how they can make a positive change in how they use it.
Encourage getting help: One benefit of the pandemic has been that it is less taboo to talk about mental health and get help, which means your teen probably has some friends in therapy. You can ask your teenager’s pediatrician or primary care doctor for a recommendation for a therapist, or at SonderMind.com we can connect you with a therapist focused on high-quality outcomes in the Dallas area who takes your insurance. The more people who can watch out for your child, listen to them, and try to help, the better off their mental health will be in the long run.
It’s clearly an incredibly difficult time to be a teenager, especially a teenage girl. But as parents and caregivers, we can do our best to support them by identifying potential signs of depression or anxiety and getting them the help that they need as soon as possible. Along with checking in with them and listening, try to take them out and do something fun to help them feel supported and cared for. This can be as simple as taking them out for pizza, going for a quick morning walk or going out to see a movie. They are teenagers afterall, so they may fight you on it initially, but it is important to show that you care and want to connect with them during these pivotal years. With more support and attention from their immediate community, they may begin to realize they aren’t as alone as they think.
About Dr. Doug Newton
As a psychiatrist, Dr. Doug Newton has dedicated his career to the wellbeing of individuals and families. Doug is pleased to further this impact as Chief Medical Officer at SonderMind, where his clinical team directly impacts the company’s mission to redesign mental and behavioral health care through increased access, utilization and outcomes. Doug leads the clinical team in its efforts to recruit and support SonderMind providers who deliver high-quality care and equip those clinicians with tools and research findings to further improve care delivery, including an ongoing research partnership with the University of Denver to assess SonderMind’s care and outcomes.
