Study shows that 50% of America’s teens are SEVERELY depressed – they know FAR too much

Who doesn’t experience some degree of depression during their teenage years? Very few of us.

But these days, teens have a lot more than puberty and the typical pressures of growing up to contend with.

Nearly 50% of today's juveniles report startling levels of depression.

So what’s changed? Why do today’s adolescents appear to be in such a dark place?

Allie Beth Stuckey dives into this issue by examining a study that tracked depression in teenagers from 1991 through 2023. And the results are deeply concerning.

The study documents how teenagers in the 8th, 10th, and 12th grades responded to the following three statements:

1. “I can’t do anything right.”

2. “My life is not useful.”

3. “I do not enjoy life.”

It’s disheartening to think that any person, much less a child, could find any of those statements true, but that’s the reality for roughly 50% of American teens today.

Stuckey reports that currently “49.5% of 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-graders think that they can’t do anything right … 48.9% say [they] do not enjoy life,” and “44% say that [their] life is not useful.”

These are alarming numbers, especially considering that depression rates among these populations were the lowest around 2008, just fifteen years ago.

Stuckey thinks that her high school days were considerably more lighthearted because kids “didn’t carry the weight of news on [their] shoulders.”

How do today’s kids have so much access to the abysmal news that plagues the media?

Social media, of course.

So today’s social-media-fluent teenagers must contend with utter depravity across the entire globe. It’s too much for most adults to digest. The fact that our teenagers are suffering really isn’t all that shocking.

Add to that the fact that studies show that “dopamine released by the videos we watch … sets [us] up to be tired and lazy for the rest of the day.”

Given these dire circumstances, Stuckey is not surprised that nearly half of current teens are left “feeling purposeless.”

She also, however, speculates that there’s more than just social media behind these disturbing statistics. Maybe it’s becoming normalized for people to assume they are depressed, even when their emotions are entirely within the spectrum of what’s considered normal.

Watch her analysis here.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

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