by Mike James

According to recent federal research, nearly one in three high school girls said they had considered suicide. This is a 60 percent increase from stats only ten years ago. This same research found 15 percent of these girls had been raped. Another six out of ten girls were so sad or hopeless that it caused them to stop regular activities.

This data comes from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They surveyed a nationally representative sample of public and private high school students.

A lot of this data was collected in the fall of 2021, so the Covid situation at the time may have played into some of this data.

The CDC opined that “America’s teen girls are engulfed in a growing wave of sadness, violence and trauma.” But why is there an increase in all of this for girls?

According to Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd, “girls are more likely to respond to pain in the world by internalizing conflict and stress and fear, and boys are more likely to translate those feelings into anger and aggression.”