Nearly a quarter of teenage girls have made a suicide plan in the past year, according to a startling new CDC report

The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, released every decade, paints an equally bleaker, if not darker picture for LGBQ+ teenagers. Along with adolescent girls, they performed worse than straight men on nearly all metrics studied, including substance abuse, experiences of violence, and factors affecting mental and sexual health.

“Our teenage girls are suffering an overwhelming wave of violence and trauma that is affecting their mental health,” Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Youth and School Health, told reporters Monday.

The authors called the differences between female and LGBQ+ teens and straight male teens “glaring”. While around a fifth of female and LGBQ+ teens have experienced sexual violence in the past year, only 5% of men have. And while nearly 60% of teen girls and nearly 70% of LGBQ+ teens had experienced “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” in the past year, less than a third of men had.

Teens who identify as LGBQ+ or who have ever had a same-sex partner were more likely than their straight peers to have had substance abuse, including illegal drugs, prescription opioids, alcohol, marijuana, and e-cigarettes. They were also generally ‘significantly’ more likely to be victims of violence.

However, there were some bright spots in the report, which examined trends from 2011 to 2021. Rates of risky sexual behavior and drug use overall continue to decline, and rates of school bullying are also declining.

But “unfortunately, nearly all other indicators of health and well-being in this report, including protective sexual behaviors, experiences of violence, mental health, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors, have deteriorated significantly,” the authors note.

“As we have seen in the 10 years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, overall student mental health continues to deteriorate,” the authors wrote, adding that more than 40% of the high school students surveyed suffered from sadness or hopelessness who prevented them from functioning normally for at least two weeks in the previous year – a potential indicator of depression.

Overall, more students are choosing not to go to school for safety reasons, and men are reporting higher rates of electronic bullying compared to a decade earlier, according to the report — the first of its kind to look at data impacted by a pandemic . collected in autumn 2021.

“Although most schools had reverted to in-person induction by this point, the time many students spent outside of school may have impacted the topics participants were surveyed about, such as mental health, the authors note and note that “disorders in daily living also remained common” when the surveys were conducted.

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