A government report released on Monday blamed the Covid-19 pandemic for taking an unprecedented toll on the overall mental health of the nation’s young people. The majority of teenage girls fared the worst, with nearly 60 percent reporting feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report provided a decade of comprehensive data results on ninth through 12th grade students’ behaviors and experiences covering sexual behavior, substance abuse, experiences of violence, mental health, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
The report summary cited that “many of the same behaviors and experiences that were moving in the wrong direction before the pandemic, like poor mental health, continued to worsen, and highlight the challenges young people continue to face.”
AP reported, “In 30 years of collecting similar data, ‘we’ve never seen this kind of devastating, consistent findings,’ said Kathleen Ethier, director of CDC’s adolescent and school health division. ‘There’s no question young people are telling us they are in crisis. The data really call on us to act.’”
Some of the key findings in the report found trends and challenges during the past decade, along with a closer look at 2021 revealing that subsets of students have very different experiences, some better and some far worse. The report stated that “across almost all measures of substance use, experiences of violence, mental health, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors, female students are faring more poorly than male students. These differences, and the rates at which female students are reporting such negative experiences, are stark.”
A brief sampling of the 2021 results shared that “nearly 30% of female students drank alcohol during the past 30 days. Almost 20% of female students experienced sexual violence by anyone during the past year and 14% had ever been physically forced to have sex.” Relating that those numbers were high, the CDC was more concerned with the reported rates of poor mental health and suicidal thoughts. “In 2021, almost 60% of female students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year and nearly 25% made a suicide plan.”
A CDC suicide attempt study found that “emergency department visits by children ages 12 to 17 for suspected suicide attempts were significantly higher during much of the pandemic when compared to the same periods in 2019. These findings were especially true for adolescent girls with the CDC study finding that such emergency department visits were over 50% higher during the winter of 2021 when compared to 2019 for girls in this age group.”
While the report focused on results driven by supposed pandemic-related issues affecting young people, the CDC failed to broaden their scope at other obvious causes of reported mental-health concerns. They didn’t once suspect nor question that this mental-health crisis could also be enhanced by the woke agenda of the Biden administration and leftist .
Political ideology may also be relevant to mental health, as research in political psychology has suggested that people with conservative political attitudes tend to have better physical health than their liberal counterparts. A Psychology Today article reported on a study in 2020 showing “people who are more liberal, especially those identifying as ‘extremely liberal,’ are more likely to have mental health problems.”
Last year, a Pew Research Center survey found that “sixty-two percent of Whites who classify themselves as ‘very liberal’ or ‘liberal’ have been told by a doctor they have a mental health condition, as compared to 26% of conservatives and 20% of moderates, the study found,” according to a Washington Times article.
The studies on political ideology are not new and get honorable mentions from the press from time to time. But what our government has failed to do in this report on the overall health and behaviors of the next generation of our nation’s leaders is to ask if the “woke” culture that they have promoted has been detrimental to the bodies, minds, and souls of today’s youth.
