What’s making teenage girls more depressed? Girls told us the biggest problem. We just didn’t want to hear it.

Surgeon General Vivek Murtha, popular psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, and politicians ignored girls in order to blame social media.

The Centers for Disease Control’s massive, 116-question 2021 survey was the only one to ask teens (7,000 of them) about a variety of issues in their lives. Though needing refining and updating, it’s the only one presenting data sufficient to implement Haidt’s colleague Zach Rausch’s suggestion:

“If we want to get a clear view of adolescent mental health, we need to look at a range of measures—from depression and self-harm (which is far more common among adolescents) to suicide rates… if we dismiss rises in teen girls' suicide rates because they are “low” and then do not account for other—more common—mental health problems among teen girls because the measures are imprecise, then when exactly should we start paying attention?”

Exactly – and I’d go further. Mammoth contradictions and questions underlie girls’ mental health and suicide issues. Begin with two obvious ones authorities don’t confront:

1.   How are teen girls keeping their suicide rates so strikingly low amid self-reports of more depression?

2.   What “common” factors drive girls’ depression?

Even at this late date, only the CDC’s 2021 Adolescent Behaviors and Risk Survey is detailed enough to allow standard analysis of multiple factors that might affect teens’ mental health – including abuse, bullying, screen time (TV, online, iPhone), sexual victimization, lack of sleep, racism, homelessness, parental unemployment, etc., That analysis yields the following results (using statisticians’ rigorous R-squared factor) about what girls tell us is really associated with their depression:

Percent of teenage girls’ depression (“poor mental health”) associated with the following potential causes:

Abuse by parent/household adult:  19.2%

Lack of sleep:  2.4%

Sexual abuse:  1.5%

Screen time:  0.8%

Cyberbullied:  0.7%

School bullying: 0.5%

School racism:  0.3%

Parent unemployment:  0.3%

All other factors: <0.1% or not significant

Unknown factors:  74.4%

Percent of teenage girls’ suicide attempts associated with:

Sexual abuse:  9.7%

Abuse by parent/household adult:  5.2%

Raped:  2.1%

Cyberbullied:  1.6%

School racism:  0.9%

Lack of sleep:  0.3%

All other factors: not significant

Unknown factors:  80.3%

Percent of teenage girls’ self-harm associated with:

Abuse by parent/adult:  9.0%

Raped:  4.2%

Cyberbullied:  1.9%

School racism:  0.9%

Sexual abuse:  0.8%

Sleep hours:  0.6%

All other factors: not significant

Unknown factors:  82.7%

Pretty clear, right? Of the survey options given them, girls chose two big problems that underlie what we know about girls’ depression.

The biggest – by far – is parent-grownup-inflicted abuse. Initially, the CDC headlined widespread abuse as the survey’s key finding of “severe challenges” youth face. A few media, such as the New York Times, NBC, and ABC News ran brief stories.

That was all. Then, major interest groups led by Surgeon General Vivek Murtha amplified Haidt and Twenge’s years-long crusade established in major media like Atlantic Magazine, The New Yorker, National Public Radio, etc., to blame girls’ use of social media instead. End of discussion.

Politicians and major associations flocked to the popular campaign. The CDC backed off. All ignored grownup-inflicted abuse and targeted girls’ online habits.

After parental abuse, the second biggest problem driving depression that girls cite is real-life sexual violence and rape victimization. The major players also shrink from this topic. A few hype sexual victimization by peers (but not adults). Others moralize over the virtual “sexual solicitations” and “pornography” teens might encounter online.

Interests also cite lack of sleep as a major contributor to girls’ depression and, even though results were mixed, again blame girls’ screen time. None mentioned the far more important effects of parental abuse: 18% of girls who are never abused get fewer than 6 hours of sleep a night, compared to 31% of girls who are sometimes abused and 45% of girls who are frequently abused.

Even amid the panic over teen suicide, no one mentioned that more screen time is not associated with teens’ suicide attempts or self-harm. In fact, the CDC survey shows teens who rarely or never use social media have higher rates of both self-harm and suicide attempts than female or male teens who are frequently online.

How can more screen time be associated with more depression in girls but less suicide, self-harm, and major risks like rape? No one is interested in that seeming contradiction. One key explanation is that social media doesn’t make girls more depressed; rather, depressed girls use social media to deal with abuse, which may help explain their low completed suicide rates.

Social media does not even begin to explain girls’ depression

It would be impossible for social media time, associated at most with a trivial 1%-2% of girls’ depression (even that could be a reverse correlation) in 2021, to explain the 15- to 20-point increase in girls’ depression and sadness from 2010-2021. That’s a dead end.

Parental abuse (associated with 19% of girls’ depression) theoretically could explain the increase if abuses increased sharply over the period. However, no good measures exist. The CDC’s is the only survey of mental health that asks about abuse, and only in 2021.

More likely, the factors driving girls’ depression lie largely in the 75% to 80% we can’t explain. We don’t know the things girls variously mean by undefined terms like “anxiety” and “depression.” Is it unhappiness with oneself? Family? School? Deteriorating adulthood? The state of the world? What issues drive unhappiness? Dissatisfaction with oneself? Family? Student debt? Climate-changed future?

Yet, we’re blustering ahead with wild speculations and blunt-instrument policies based on drastically limited “studies” that don’t even begin to ask girls the right questions about what’s depressing them. You’d almost think we don’t want to know.