AMERICA is in the midst of an epidemic of mental illness among young people. Few know this better than Daniel Eisenberg. In 2007 the UCLA health-policy professor, then at the University of Michigan, sent a mental-health survey to 5,591 college students and found that 22% showed signs of depression. Over the next 15 years, as new students were polled, this figure grew. In 2022, when more than 95,000 students at 373 universities were surveyed, a staggering 44% displayed symptoms of depression. Then, curiously, the trend reversed. In 2023 41% of students seemed depressed; in 2024, the figure fell again to 38%. Mr Eisenberg is cautiously optimistic: “It’s the first time that things are moving in a positive direction.”
University students are not the only ones feeling more upbeat. An analysis of several national surveys by The Economist suggests that the brighter mood sweeping across college campuses is part of a broader trend in America. From depression diagnoses to suicides, the data suggest that America’s children are feeling slightly more cheery. The trend is a hopeful sign for parents and policymakers, too. But it also raises puzzling questions for researchers. Psychologists have spent years trying to understand how America’s young got so gloomy. Now they have to work out what is behind those rosier dispositions.
We examined data from seven different surveys of mental health and wellbeing, as well as suicide rates. On every measure teenagers and young adults have seemed to be doing better in the past few years. In the National Health Interview Survey carried out by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the share of young adults who reported feeling depressed at least once a week fell from 16.5% in 2022 to 13.3% in the most recent data from 2023 (although this is still well above pre-pandemic levels). In 2023 the share of 15- and 16-year-olds who said they don’t enjoy life was 24.7%, down from 28.8% in 2021. The suicide rate of 18- to 25-year-olds has also fallen to 16.1 for every 100,000, slightly below the rates from 2017 to 2019.
The shift follows more than a decade in which youngsters’ mental health deteriorated on virtually every measure. In 2022 one in six American adults under 25 reported feeling depressed at least once a week, more than double the rate seen ten years earlier; nearly one in ten adolescents said they had been diagnosed with depression. In 2021 more than one in five teenagers reported suffering a “major depressive episode”, defined as a two-week period in which they were too sad to carry out everyday activities; around 40% of high-school students said they had persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.
Researchers have struggled to explain why young people have become so unhappy. One popular theory, first proposed by Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, and popularised by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU, is that social media are to blame. The decline in teenagers’ mental health in the early 2010s, the argument goes, coincided with the rise of smartphones and social-media apps such as Instagram and Facebook. Although many find this theory appealing, the most rigorous studies, which track teenagers’ mood and social-media use over long periods of time, do not find a strong relationship between the use of such apps and subsequent poor mental health.
Part of the rise in mental-health conditions may be caused by changes in how they are defined. Young Americans are both more open about sharing their struggles and have different ideas of what qualifies as poor mental health. Under-25s are much more likely to say weight changes or difficulty concentrating are signs of a mental-health problem, for example. Common experiences are pathologised and therapy-speak has found its way into everyday language. “There’s been a reinterpreting of what trauma means,” explains Katherine Keyes of Columbia University.
But changing definitions are clearly not the whole story. In 2021 the suicide rate of under-17s was 5.1 per 100,000, up from 3.5 in 2001. The rates for 18-to 25-year-olds rose from 11.6 to 18.1 per 100,000 over the same period. Whatever the cause, there are at last signs that the relentless increase in mental-health problems has stalled or even reversed. Like happiness itself, the causes are mysterious. But that should not stop America celebrating. ■
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