The Fleeting Persistence of Hopelessness

(A Comment on Why American Teens Are So Sad)

A recent essay in The Atlantic titled Why American Teens Are So Sad starts with alarming news:

The United States is experiencing an extreme teenage mental-health crisis. From 2009 to 2021, the share of American high-school students who say they feel “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 44 percent, according to a new CDC study.

The notion that nearly half of U.S. teens have been in a state of constant desperation lately is reinforced by a graph labeled Percent of High-School Students Feeling Persistently Sad or Hopeless that displays the rate climbing up to 44.2% in 2021:

Note: The Atlantic mislabeled 2009 as 2004 and at least two data points are incorrect (Overall rate in 2015 and 2017) -- but these errors are not relevant to this critique.

 

The problem is that it is not true.