New Report Points to Progress on Teen Mental Health

August 10, 2025 1

A new federal report provides some encouraging preliminary news about mental health trends among adolescents.

Adolescent mental health is showing signs of improvement, with a new federal report finding fewer teens self-reporting major depressive episodes and suicidal thoughts in 2024.

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health, conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, found adolescents aged 12 to 17 reported over a 20% decrease from 2021 to 2024 in depressive episodes and serious suicidal thoughts, planning and attempts over the course of the year.

The data provides a positive look that analysts hope to see mirrored in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s statistics for 2024, which have not yet been released.

“It’s encouraging and welcome news, because the decade or two prior to 2020, we were seeing pretty rapid and consistent increase each year in (these metrics),” says Tanner Bommersbach, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

But without seeing other national surveys and long-term trends, it is too early to come to any conclusions yet, Bommersbach says.

The 2024 survey, based on responses from over 70,000 people aged 12 and up across the United States, is the first year that trends have been analyzed since 2020 following a change in methodology. The shift allows researchers to track changes in youth mental health since the beginning of the pandemic.

Suicide remains a leading cause of death among adolescents, according to the report, a reality that has concerned families and advocates across the country.

Upward trends during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic “did open the eyes of a lot of policymakers, a lot of parents and other adults,” says Christine Crawford, associate medical director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

“Parents, caregivers, as well as teachers, are a little bit more psychologically minded and more attuned to the mental health needs of the kids around them,” Crawford says, which has led to an increase in accessible mental health programs for youth, including school-based programs and telehealth.

Many programs focus on prevention and early intervention, a strategy endorsed by the World Health Organization that provides individuals with the tools needed to deal with difficult situations before they escalate. By doing this, she says, adults normalize talking about difficult topics.

“I’m really encouraged by the fact that people realize that when it comes to youth mental health, we don’t have to wait until the kid is older or wait until there’s a crisis,” she says. “This idea of prevention, this idea of early intervention has now infiltrated the youth mental health space.”

Bommersbach – a child and adolescent psychiatrist and mental health services researcher with a focus on suicide prevention – says that, although the report does not examine the reasons behind the data, the survey is one of the few examinations into national youth mental health data.

And, he says, while the reducing trends are encouraging, some rates are still far too high. With over a fifth of all adolescents experiencing at least one major depressive episode over the year prior to the survey and 10.1% of adolescents having serious thoughts of suicide, the work isn’t over.

Only 60% of adolescents who experienced a major depressive episode reported receiving mental health treatment that year. Those who did not receive care reported some of the main reasons being fear of what others might think, concern that their information would not stay private and not thinking treatment would help.

The report shows no notable change in the same mental health indicators for adults. A stagnation, Crawford says, that needs to be addressed.

“It means that people are still struggling,” she says. “If parents are struggling, then they’re not going to be able to provide the modeling of tools that could be used to cope with stress, to cope with big emotions, and that’s how kids learn how to take care of their mental health is through the modeling provided by their parents and the adults in their lives.”

And Crawford says some groups – namely children of color and those in the LGBTQ+ community – remain disproportionately at risk of depression and suicide, making the examination of subgroup data especially important. Bommersbach agreed, highlighting American Indian, Alaskan Native and Black youth, groups that historically have higher rates of suicide than other demographics.

The report currently lacks demographic data, which will be published at a later date, according to a spokesperson from the Department of Health and Human Services.

For caregivers, Crawford emphasized that communication with their children and outside resources remains one of the most helpful things they can do. Talking to children about mental health, while uncomfortable at first, is a matter of safety, she says, just like conversations surrounding sex, drug use or wearing a seat belt.

“If your kid is in a public school, they most likely have a primary care provider. So you want to talk to that primary care provider about some of the signs and symptoms of certain common mental health conditions,” she says. “Talk to them about what resources are available.”

Source: https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2025-08-08/new-report-points-to-progress-on-teen-mental-health

Written by: Joshua Stuart

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