Suicide is now the leading cause of death for young people in America. That should be shocking.

Another aspect of this trend of rising suicides among young people in the United States is that data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC’) indicate that for the first time the rates of suicide for young females has been increasing faster than the rate for young males. The overall rate is still higher for young males, but the young women and girls are making serious efforts to catch up with the males. Why is that?

Psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman writing in the New York Times pointed to the connection between depression and youth suicides. As suicide rates were rising, so were rates of teen depression. The rate of teen depression recently rose by 63%! As Friedman reported, “In 2017, 13 percent of teens reported at least one episode of depression in the past year, compared with 8 percent of teens in 2007, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.”

Friedman found this trend particularly disturbing because “we know perfectly well how to treat this illness.” I am not actually as confident that our health care professionals know what to do, but nonetheless his comments are relevant.  We should be doing better to help the teens. As he asked, “If thousands of teens were dying from a new infectious disease or a heart ailment, there would be a public outcry and a national call to action.”

The fact is that young people may be physically healthy, but they are, as he says, “psychiatrically vulnerable.” Three-quarters of all the mental illness that we see in adults has already occurred by age 25. Our collective failure to act in the face of this epidemic is all the more puzzling since we are living at a time when people are generally more accepting of mental illness and stigma is on the wane.” Once more let me add, that I am not as confident as he is that we are doing such a great job in helping to eliminate stigma as he suggests, but at least we have made efforts in that direction that until recently we could not claim.

It is fairly clear that our young people are not getting the treatment they should. As Friedman said, “Only 45 percent of teenage girls who had an episode of depression in 2019 received any treatment, and just 33 percent of teenage boys with depression did. In contrast, two-thirds of adults with a recent episode of depression received treatment.” That suggests this serious problem is not being addressed.

Mental illness is always a serious problem, but when it is youth that are suffering it is even more disturbing and I think suggest a serious decline in the nation.