Inside the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis

The Daily

The New York Times

News, Daily News

4.5 • 97.8K Ratings

🗓️ 30 August 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode contains discussions about suicide, self-harm and mental health issues. In decades past, the public health risks teenagers in the United States faced were different. They were externalized risks that were happening in the physical world. Now, a new set of risks has emerged. In 2019, 13 percent of adolescents reported having a major depressive episode, a 60 percent increase from 2007. And suicide rates, which had been stable from 2000 to 2007 among this group, leaped nearly 60 percent by 2018. We explore why this mental health crisis has become so widespread, and why many people have been unprepared to handle it. Guest: Matt Richtel, a correspondent based in San Francisco for The New York Times.

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0:00.0	From New York Times, I'm Michael Barrow. This is a Daily.
0:07.0	Today, why the mental health crisis of
0:14.1	Flicting America's Youth has become so widespread and why seemingly everyone has been so unprepared
0:22.7	to handle it?
0:24.6	I spoke with my colleague Matt Rittor about what his investigation has found.
0:31.6	It's Tuesday, August 30th.
0:36.6	Matt, for the past couple of years, you have been exploring a topic that especially
0:44.3	throughout the pandemic has become a lot more visible to people, which is that kids and
0:49.7	especially teenagers in the United States are in the throes of a mental health crisis.
0:55.2	So tell me about that reporting.
0:57.7	A couple of years ago, we noticed that young people are dealing with mental health distress
1:03.7	and we started to look into the numbers to ask what's really going on.
1:09.8	In 2019, Michael, 13% of adolescents reported having a major depressive episode and that
1:16.8	was a 60% increase from 2007.
1:20.4	Suicide rates, which had been stable from 2000 to 2007 among this group, leapt nearly
1:27.7	60% by 2018.
1:31.8	So we started with a basic set of facts.
1:35.2	Curiously, this was not the set of facts alone that told us we had something significant
1:42.5	to investigate.
1:43.5	What do you mean?
1:44.5	Well, there was a separate set of data.
1:47.4	When I was an adolescent at the risk of dating myself in the 80s, the public health risks
	...

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