A graphic illustration of older generations' massive suicide and drug epidemics American teenagers have to face

Could their fathers’, mothers’, uncles’, aunts’, teachers’, etc., tragic trends have anything to do with why girls are more depressed?

Source: Centers for Disease Control 2024.

Figure 1. Suicide and overdose rates, teenage girls vs. men and women of age to be their parents as Generation Z grew up, 2000-2022.

It’s too bad teenagers don’t have multi-million-dollar lobbies, campaign funders, and press agents in Washington and state capitals. They might have a chance at forcing attention to their real vital interests instead of authorities’ self-serving crusades dominating youth-issue politics.

I’m going to keep repeating graphs and comparisons like Figure 1’s until the powers finally take them seriously, which they continue to refuse to do even through today. The myth that parents and adults around teens are just fine while social-media-deluded teens are depressed and suicidal defies massive real-world trends among grownups not just in the United States, but in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. In fact, both research and surveys repeatedly cited here show the teens whose “crises” are constantly and loudly sensationalized overwhelmingly come from families whose adults suffer and inflict far worse risks.

Appallingly, by their silence, authorities have decreed that skyrocketing hundreds of thousands’ more parents dead from overdoses and suicides from 2010-2022 (more than the entire population of Cincinnati gone in just 13 years) couldn’t possibly be why girls got more depressed during the same period.

No; the big problem is just smartphones, TikTok, Instagram, and social media, experts led by Surgeon General Vivek Murtha insist.

To understand how grossly claims of an “adolescent suicide crisis” and “drug crisis” supposedly fueled by social media have been warped all out of proportion to buttress comfortable official myths, consider the following analogy.

Suppose Gambler A loses $400 on his first night in Vegas and $1,250 on his second night, while Gambler B loses $8,800 the first night and $23,300 the second. Granted that neither goes home happy, which gambler has the bigger problem?

Obviously, any sane person would say, Gambler B, who lost $32,100 in two nights, 19 times more than the $1,650 lost by Gambler A.

Wrong, declare American mental health authorities and media commentators dominating statements about teenagers. Gambler A has the bigger problem, all insist. His gambling losses (though small) rose by 312% from night one to night two, while Gambler B’s losses (though huge) rose by “only” 265%.

That is the lunatic illogic comparing misleading percentage changes for wildly differing numbers that Murtha, leading authorities, and media commentators are peddling (just look at relevant substacks on here) to wildly hype rare suicides and self-destructive deaths by teenage girls while dismissing the massive, far worse surge in grownup self-destruction they refuse to admit exists.

The “gambling” numbers above approximate real self-destructive (suicide and overdose) death numbers for 10-19-year-old girls (the age and gender raising the most alarm) versus men age 40-49 (the age to be girls’ fathers) as Gen Z grew up in the 2000s.

On a per-capita basis (which is how real people in real families experience life’s real events), the middle-aged men became a staggering 19 times more likely to self-destruct (113 suicide/overdose deaths per 100,000 men age 40-49 in 2022, versus 6 per 100,000 girls age 10-19), and their self-destructive deaths rose 18 times faster (71 annual deaths per 100,000 men, versus 4 per 100,000 girls), than their teenaged daughters, stepdaughters, nieces, students, etc.

Yet, Murtha (age 47, male) shrinks from honestly confronting the harsh reality (one teenagers cannot so comfortably evade) that his own older age and gender are suffering and perpetrating the worst “crises” by far – ones clearly implicated in making girls more depressed.

Not that we’ve asked girls about this. I’d bet a large ranch I don’t own that if the CDC adds a survey question asking teens if their parents have overdosed, been treated for, been arrested for, been hospitalized for, or otherwise suffered a serious drug or alcohol abuse problem, their “yes” answers would strongly correlate with teens’ own depression, suicide attempts, self-harm, and other risks. I’d be delighted to hear anyone’s alternative theory.

Teenagers, girls in particular, have the right to be furious about grownups’ trends and authorities’ indifference and scapegoating. Middle-agers smugly boast of superior brains and maturity justifying greater rights, wealth, power, and resources, including medical and mental health services. There is no excuse for the gross epidemics middle-aged America, including millions who chose to be parents, are inflicting on teens today. And middle-agers insist on surveys that their mental health is just fine? How could anyone take that seriously?

There is even less excuse for Murtha and other authorities to exploit grotesquely misleading sensationalism that scapegoats and punishes teenagers with restrictions on their social media access. Large majorities of teens say they benefit from social media, using it to maintain social contacts and obtain help in difficult situations. Teenagers live in the real world even as the troubled grownups, especially men, perpetrate vastly worse crises today’s authorities refuse to recognize.