The CDC’s massive new survey shows teenage girls are not suffering a “mental health crisis.” They’re reacting normally to difficult conditions imposed by troubled adults.

Political and health authorities who evade the harsh realities girls face and obsess over smartphones and social media are proving incompetent to govern young people.

Grandstanding lawmakers, state officials, popular psychologists, and wildly misinformed media commentators are champing to ban teenagers under age 16 from social media – or, nearly as misguided, to require parental consent for teen social media use. These “save the children!” crusaders express anguished concern for the mental health of younger girls exposed to social-media corruptions and peer cyberbullying.

However, the 3,200 girls ages 12-15 answering the Centers for Disease Control’s latest biannual Youth Risk Behavior survey have a powerful message for girl-saving crusaders: those truly concerned about “teenage mental health” should obsess instead over fixing troubled families – a crucial task they’re abjectly failing.

The CDC’s just-released full survey and accompanying analyses show well over half of America’s under-16 girls grow up in severely troubled families, where parents or guardians suffer drug/alcohol, mental health, jailing, and absence problems, and household adults frequently inflict domestic violence and abuses on each other and girls. Another one-third live in families with lesser but still worrisome troubles.

These are the girls authorities stigmatize (in tones of “concern”) for suffering a “mental health crisis.” In fact, the four in 10 girls reporting frequent depression are reacting normally to severe troubles afflicting and inflicted by adults they depend on – they would be disturbed if they reacted any other way.

Grownups’ abuses and troubles are mathematically associated with a 66% to 89% of teens’ poor mental health and suicidal tendencies, the new CDC analysis reports. Just as authorities ignored less detailed warnings in the CDC’s 2021 survey, they are again ignoring clear bombshells in the latest survey.

*By parent, guardian, or other household adult. Source: Centers for Disease Control, 2024. “Healthy” parents/adults are those with no addiction, violence, severe mental health, suicide, criminal, absence, or emotional abuse problems. “Severely troubled” parents/adults are those with addiction, mental health, criminal, or frequent absence problems, and/or frequent domestic violence, violent abuse, and emotional abuse behaviors. “Some problems” are in between.

The numbers are staggering and easily verifiable. Compared to the one in six girls who grow up in healthy families, the majority of girls from seriously troubled families are three times more likely to be bullied at school, four times more likely to suffer sadness, four times more likely to be cyberbullied, six times more likely to be raped, seven times more likely to be sexually abused by an older adult, 10 times more likely to attempt suicide, 17 times more likely to abuse pharmaceutical drugs, and 21 times more likely to self-harm seriously enough “to be treated by a doctor or nurse.” FBI statistics parallel these risks. They show two-thirds of murdered girls ages 6-14 are killed not by supposedly dangerous peers, but by murderers age 25 and older.

Yet, while the CDC and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy have issued recent reports suggesting (very circumspectly, and both being ignored) that maybe teens’ mental health issues have far larger causes than smartphones, TikTok, and bullying peers, media-adored authorities continue to blame girls themselves for being weak and emotionally fragile, addicting themselves to online moguls’ exploitative algorithms, and requiring severe smartphone and social-media restrictions.

Young girls facing very tough home environments have been forthright on officials’ own surveys to delineate their obvious crises – and officials ignore and betray them. America’s political and mental health leaders continue to prove they lack the basic elder concern and competence to govern young people.