Inside the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis

This episode contains discussions about suicide, self-harm and mental health issues.

In decades past, the public health risks teenagers in the United States faced were different. They were externalized risks that were happening in the physical world.

Now, a new set of risks has emerged.

In 2019, 13 percent of adolescents reported having a major depressive episode, a 60 percent increase from 2007. And suicide rates, which had been stable from 2000 to 2007 among this group, leaped nearly 60 percent by 2018.

We explore why this mental health crisis has become so widespread, and why many people have been unprepared to handle it.

Guest: Matt Richtel, a correspondent based in San Francisco for The New York Times.

Background reading: 

• Depression, self-harm and suicide are rising among American adolescents. The coronavirus pandemic intensified the decline in mental health among teenagers but predated it.
• Increasingly, anxious and depressed teens are using multiple, powerful psychiatric drugs, many of them untested in adolescents or for use in tandem.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.