The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last week that American teens are more distressed than ever recorded after two years of COVID-19 lockdowns.

The CDC conducted its biennial Youth Risk Behavior Survey that found 57 percent of high school females have reported persistent sadness or hopelessness, which is a significant jump from 10 years ago. Men in the same age category also saw a jump in hopelessness in the same timeframe, from 21 percent to 29 percent. 

About 30 percent of females in high school said they seriously considered suicide, which is a noticeable increase from 19 percent. The survey included 17,000 students who were questioned in the fall of 2021.

“In 2021 30 percent of females seriously considered attempting suicide—up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago and 57 percent felt persistently sad or hopeless—double that of boys. This is the highest increase, nearly 60 percent, over the past decade,” the survey said.

Teen girls are experiencing a suicide “crisis” in the U.S.

Kathleen Ethier, the head of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, said the COVID-19 outbreak has attracted a lot of attention, but the data was headed in the wrong direction “before the pandemic.” But she said in the 30 years of collecting similar data, “we’ve never seen this kind of devastating, consistent findings.”

“There’s no question young people are telling us they are in crisis. The data really calls on us to act,” she said.

Of course the impact of lockdowns did not only affect American teens. 

Cygnet Healthcare said mental health referrals for teenagers in London more than doubled in the last four years and has jumped by 113 percent from 2018 to 2022. The healthcare provider told Britain’s Evening Standard that there has been a significant increase in the number of young people presenting with a “low mood, insomnia, stress, and anxiety,” and many have experienced “depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms” after the lockdowns.

Dr. Triveni Joshi, a consultant psychiatrist who specializes in child and adolescent psychiatry, told the paper that it may take years to learn if the virus itself “disturbed young people’s neurological development but we have emerging evidence which tells us about the detrimental impact of lockdown.”

“It impacted young people’s mental health and well-being severely, particularly those who had pre-existing mental health conditions,” he said. 

TRENDPOST: The Trends Journal has long said the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent lockdowns has had an incalculable impact on young people in the country. We were led by power-hungry morons in government who dreamed of a power-grab unlike any the free world has ever seen. 

Governments got to choose what businesses succeeded and which ones failed. 

Young developing minds, desperate for social development, were forced into isolation. (See “COVID-19 LOCKDOWNS LEFT CHILDREN BRAIN DAMAGED, NEW STUDY SUGGESTS” 6 Dec 2022, “WHO NEEDS COLLEGE? UNIVERSITIES STRUGGLE WITH ENROLLMENT AFTER COVID LOCKDOWNS, AS WE FORECAST” 12 Oct 2022, and “COVID-19 LOCKDOWNS DID IRREPARABLE DAMAGE FOR GENERATION OF STUDENTS, AS THE TRENDS JOURNAL FORECAST” 13 Sep 2022.)

Since the beginning of summer 2020, political leaders in the U.S., backed by their health experts and amplified by a mainstream media glad to accommodate, have been putting forth the notion that schools are “super-spreader” environments requiring the need to be extremely cautious about reopening.

On 14 December 2021, when most students in the U.S. were returning to in-person classes, we published an article titled, “SCHOOLS: THE NEW ‘Abnormal.’”

We noted that schools around the U.S. reported experiencing increases in unruly behaviors such as talking in class, treating adults and one another disrespectfully, and strewing trash about, to more serious issues.

Peter Faustino, on the board of the National Association of School Psychologists, says that a normal full academic year’s worth of mental health and behavioral incidents have occurred in just the first three months of the current school year; “I think the pandemic was like an earthquake and I think we are seeing that tidal wave hit shore,” he said.

Stanford University, in collaboration with the Associated Press, found that the public school enrollment from kindergarten to twelfth grade has declined by 1.2 million students in the first two years of the outbreak, with home-schooling up by 30 percent. The Wall Street Journal said the study noted three possible explanations, including truancy, the jump in home-schooling, and a jump in toddlers skipping kindergarten. 

The paper said it is “more worrisome” if children “decided that going to school is a waste, perhaps because they weren’t learning much.”

“If many stopped going to school altogether, then the pandemic learning loss may be even greater than has been reported and may never be made up.”