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When teens return to school this fall, many parents are worried about their mental health. And justification: teens today, especially girls, are much more likely to say they are saddened or hopeless than they were a decade ago and think about suicide.
40% of high school students reported experiencing enduring sadness and despair in 2023. Youth risk behavior survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US. That figure fell from a 42% high two years ago during the Covid-19 pandemic, but is about 10 percentage points higher than 10 years ago.
Journalist Matt Richell reveals the mental health crisis of the teenager and what can be done about it in his new book, How We Grow: Inderninged Adolescente. Richtel, a science reporter for the New York Times in Boulder, Colorado, spent four years studying the youth in the book.
In our conversation, Richtel provided important insights into why teenagers are so stressed, and what we can do about it.
The conversation is clearly edited and condensed.
CNN: What explains today’s teenage mental health crisis?
Matt Richell: Adolescent mental health is best understood by understanding what adolescents are experiencing, and there is a new science that can help explain it. They have brains that are very sensitized during periods of time when the world is moving very quickly and receive a large amount of information. Sometimes they experience an overload of information that appears to be intense anti-mission, anxiety, and other mental health distress.
CNN: Does a lot of that information overload come from social media?
Richell: A kind of thing. There is a misconception that phone calls are the idiosyncratic or overwhelming source of the problem. In fact, science is more complicated.
In the 1980s, youth faced immense challenges associated with harsh drinking, drunk driving, early experimentation of gender, injuries and death. These risks have fallen sharply. The key to that context is that it shows that there are major issues that are occurring during this crucial period of living, and taking away the phone won’t solve it.
There is a reason to restrict access to your phone, as screen time replaces sleep, exercise, and face-to-face interactions. At the same time, the challenges faced by adolescents come from a larger phenomenon.
CNN: What is the bigger phenomenon that explains why adolescents are such a tough time?
Richell: Puberty is a process with a very important purpose. In other words, it is known and unknown integration into a rapidly changing world. What is known is what your parents tell you just as you should read books. The unknown is something that actually works when this world is changing. For example, books may not be like that anymore.
This integration of known and unknown creates a great sense of adolescent internal conflict. My parents who love me and feed me have said one thing to me, but I’m discovering something else.
This occurs against the background of declining adolescents. Just as adolescence occurs earlier, it makes the adolescent brains sensitive to all this information early in life when the rest of their brains are not particularly equipped to deal with it. This creates a kind of neurological discrepancy between what adolescents can incorporate and what they can handle.
CNN: Does this also help explain why teens don’t listen to their parents?
Richell: yes. They don’t listen to their parents as they are transitioning to having to learn to care for themselves and their offspring after being cared for by their parents. Some of the research into how teens start listening to their parents and listening to strangers is pretty much entertaining.
When your child sees you with that blank face, you are not looking at jerk, but at evolutionary biology.
I tell my parents, don’t take something like this personally. You tell your child, “Hey, stop it! You sound like a jerk. I don’t like it.” But that’s very different from taking it personally.
CNN: We call this generation of teenagers “generational anti-mission.” why?
Richell: Youth are programmed to explore the world around them. In the past, the search took place outside. “I’m going to fake this river. I’m going to climb this mountain. I’m going to jump off this roof.” Especially since the 1960s, but now there’s more exploration happening inside.
When it happened outside, there were a lot of fractures. Over the past few decades, more and more people have been asking mental health questions.
The question has come to mind over the past 20 years that no one has bothered talking about before. What is a boy and what is a girl? It is uncomfortable for people, and it is part of the survival mechanism of the human species, allowing adolescents to explore for themselves and others.
CNN: You say that many teens don’t know why they feel bad when they have a loved one. why?
Richell: This is an example of what it’s like to feel like adolescence. As a parent, let’s say you take part in a battle with your spouse on the same day your boss leaves. Then you get a bad night’s sleep and the next day you’re driving down the road so you see the driver looking at you, you look over. You will experience road rage. That driver isn’t everything. And perhaps the driver was actually laughing. It’s about the combination of factors that have really led you to feel intense. We sometimes feel that way as parents. That’s how youth feel all the time.
So when they say they don’t understand why they feel that way, I think we can empathize, or at least sympathize as parents.
CNN: Some believe that the reason why more teenagers today have mental health issues is because they are diagnosed and spoken more than they did in the past. Or is there more teenagers actually having mental health issues?
Richell: I think both are true. There are teenagers with mental health challenges. We are scrutinizing it very much.
CNN: I say social media has a very different effect on different children. Why is this?
Richell: Interestingly, some kids actually feel better after using social media. Some kids are feeling sick. It really depends on your genetic predisposition and how much you use it.
If you use it all the time, you are replacing anything you know to be truly healthy (sleep, exercise, face-to-face interactions, etc.). That’s really important. However, using it at that moment can have different effects on various children. Some kids will be happy.
If you are lonely and want to connect with someone, it’s different from when you tend to compare yourself to others, and whenever you see a superficially healthy, wealthy, beautiful person online, you say “it’s awful when you compare.” Or look at someone online at the fit and say, “I need to stop eating.” But not everyone has that predisposition.
CNN: What advice do you give parents when their kids get back to school and their teens get overwhelmed?
Richell: We need to teach our children coping skills.
Some of the things they need are to allow Rather than trying to have a rational conversation, it gives off emotions. If your child says, “Everyone in grade 9 hates me,” that’s not that reasonable. It is probably the product of a lot of material, such as insomnia, bad experiences, and trying to deal with a lot of information.
Some of the coping skills we are talking about include putting your face in the snow, taking a cold shower or exercising, all neurotransmitters and neurochemicals calming down.
If you can afford it, cognitive and dialectical behavioral therapy are tools that make people realize that they can deal with and let go of these sensations they have in their bodies.
But at this point, when you try to have that conversation with a child, you add information to your already paralyzed brain. An overwhelmed child is like a computer with a blue screen. When adding information, it’s like hitting the Enter key many times. I’m not going to do anything.
Move them without trying to speak of reason. It’s hard for them to be reasonable during an overload, so wait until they’re ready to hear you. Parents are truly the biggest influencers in their children’s lives.
Kara Alaimo is an associate professor of communications at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her book, Over the Influence: Why Social Media Is Toxic to Women and Girls, and How to Recover It, was published in 2024 by Alcove Press.
