CDC Survey Finds Teen Mental Health Improving, but a Narrower Report Draws Scrutiny

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Monday that fewer American high schoolers are experiencing persistent sadness, poor mental health or suicidal thoughts than two years ago, alongside gains in fruit and vegetable eating and sports participation — a rare run of positive numbers after more than a decade of rising teen distress. But the report presenting those findings is noticeably thinner than past editions, omitting the detailed breakdowns on sexual violence, drug and opioid use, and LGBTQ students that anchored previous versions, a change researchers who track the data say makes it harder to see who is being left behind.

The findings come from Youth Health in Focus, a new CDC report built on the agency's long-running Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which has polled nationally representative samples of U.S. high schoolers every two years since 1991. The agency announced the release comparing 2023 and 2025 results alongside 10-year trends back to 2015.

The numbers

Between 2023 and 2025, the share of high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness fell from 40 percent to 33 percent, according to the CDC. The share reporting poor mental health dropped from 29 percent to 23 percent, and the share who said they had seriously considered suicide fell from 20 percent to 14 percent. Reported suicide attempts fell from 9 percent to 6 percent over the same period.

Dietary and activity numbers moved in the same direction. Daily fruit consumption rose from 33 percent to 39 percent of students, daily vegetable consumption rose from 58 percent to 63 percent, and the share drinking plain water at least three times a day climbed from 54 percent to 58 percent. Sports team participation rose from 52 percent to 58 percent.

Other indicators barely moved, or worsened. Only about 24 percent of students got at least eight hours of sleep on an average school night in 2025, essentially unchanged from 23 percent in 2023. Roughly 36 percent of students said they used social media hourly or more, similar to 37 percent two years earlier. And among students who drove in the past month, 46 percent said they had texted or emailed while driving, up from 42 percent in 2023.

A turn after a decade of rising distress

The improvement follows a period in which most of these same indicators moved steadily in the other direction. Reported sadness and hopelessness among high schoolers climbed for years before peaking around 2021, near the height of pandemic-era disruption to schooling and social life, before beginning to recede in the survey's two most recent cycles. CDC officials framed the new numbers as evidence that the decline has continued and, in some categories, accelerated.

The report itself makes no claims about what caused the shift, but CDC leadership tied the findings to the administration's broader "Make America Healthy Again" initiative, which has emphasized nutrition and physical activity. Outside researchers have offered a more cautious read, noting that some of the gains largely represent a retreat from a pandemic-era peak rather than a return to, or improvement on, pre-2020 baselines.

Who is affected, and what the report leaves out

Girls continued to report far higher rates of distress than boys even as the overall numbers improved: 43 percent of high school girls reported persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2025, according to figures reported by NBC News, down from 53 percent in 2023 but still well above the rate for boys and above where the measure stood before the pandemic-era peak of 57 percent in 2021.

Unlike past editions, the new report does not break out results for lesbian, gay, bisexual and questioning students, who have consistently reported far higher rates of poor mental health and suicidal thoughts than their heterosexual peers in every prior YRBS cycle, even though the underlying survey still asked students about their sexual orientation. It also drops the emphasis prior reports placed on trends in sexual violence against teen girls and in opioid and other drug use, topics that shaped headlines around the survey in previous years.

"Overall, we see things are getting better, but for who? Oftentimes, it's the more advantaged groups," said Ariel Beccia, an instructor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who noted the report also omits the socioeconomic barriers that shape which students can easily eat fruits and vegetables.

Mike Underwood, acting director of the CDC's Division of Adolescent and School Health, defended the report's scope, saying its intent was "to provide a high-level snapshot of youth health behaviors for all youth" rather than a full accounting of every subgroup. The full 2025 dataset, which does include demographic breakdowns, remains available separately through the report's technical notes and data tables for researchers who want to examine those patterns directly.

What happens next

Even researchers encouraged by the topline numbers cautioned that the gains are fragile. The federal government canceled a round of school-based mental health grants in the spring of 2025, and some education and school-psychology groups have said they are watching to see whether recent improvements hold without that funding. "These are hopeful signs in recent years. We need to keep that momentum," Underwood said of the trend, while acknowledging that a large share of students still struggle with basic health behaviors that affect long-term wellbeing.

The next Youth Risk Behavior Survey is due to be fielded in the fall of 2027, on the same two-year cycle the CDC has followed for more than three decades, which will show whether the current improvement continues, stalls, or gives way to another swing in the other direction. In the meantime, the unresolved questions raised by this year's narrower report — about which students are being tracked closely and which are not — are likely to shape how closely outside researchers scrutinize the full dataset in the weeks ahead.