Fewer American Teenagers Are Struggling This Year

If you have been watching your teenager and quietly worrying about how she is really doing, the newest national data gives you something this subject rarely offers a mother: good news. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released its 2025 survey of teen mental health, and between 2023 and 2025, five of the six things it tracks as signs of poor mental health and suicide risk among high school students got better. The improvements were large enough to be real rather than statistical noise.

Five of the six warning signs the CDC tracks are down since 2023

In 2025, about 1 in 3 high school students said they felt persistently sad or hopeless in the past year. Around 23 percent reported poor mental health overall, roughly 14 percent said they had seriously considered suicide, 12 percent had made a plan, and 6 percent had made an attempt. Those numbers are still sobering, but five of those six measures improved between 2023 and 2025, so fewer teenagers are sitting in that dark place than were two years ago.

The CDC was plain about it in its youth mental health findings: "These findings make it clear that progress is possible. However, sustained, evidence-based strategies are needed to build on these gains." After the last few years, being able to say progress is possible is not a small thing. The checking in, the noticing and the showing up that mothers have been doing is part of a national trend that is finally moving the right way.

Girls are still carrying more of this than boys

If you are raising a daughter, this is the part to watch. On all six measures, girls reported higher rates than boys. In 2025, 43 percent of girls said they felt persistently sad or hopeless, compared with 24 percent of boys. Eighteen percent of girls had seriously considered suicide, against 11 percent of boys. Eight percent had made an attempt, compared with 5 percent of boys.

None of that means your daughter is in trouble. It means the baseline of stress she is navigating is, on average, higher than her brother's, and she may show it in ways that are easy to miss because she keeps functioning. A girl who is still making her grades and answering "fine" can be one of the girls these numbers describe. That is a reason to keep the door open a little wider, not a reason to panic.

Your ninth-grader may need more attention than your senior

We tend to worry hardest about the older kids, with their college applications and later curfews. But ninth-graders were more likely than 11th and 12th graders to make a suicide plan and to make an attempt. The younger teens, the ones just walking into high school, showed higher risk on those two measures than the ones about to leave it.

That fits something a lot of mothers feel and then talk themselves out of: fourteen is a harder age than it looks from the outside. If you have a younger teen at home, it is worth staying close through the ninth-grade transition rather than assuming the hardest years come later.

Knowing the warning signs is where prevention starts

The most useful frame comes from The Jason Foundation, a nonprofit focused on youth suicide awareness that provides its resources at no cost. Its chief communications officer, Brett Marciel, read the same data and said the numbers show "progress is possible, but there is still work to do."

"Prevention begins with awareness," Marciel said. "When students, parents, educators, and other caring adults know the warning signs and how to respond, they are better equipped to connect a young person with appropriate support." That does not ask you to be a therapist or to have the perfect words. It asks you to stay aware: to treat changes in mood, withdrawal, or talk that worries you as something to pay attention to rather than wait out, and to be the adult who helps a teenager reach real support when something feels off.

If you are worried tonight, one number is always open

If your worry is not abstract, if it is about a specific kid in a specific bedroom down the hall, you do not have to hold it alone or work out the right professional to call first. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is there for exactly this. Anyone in the US can call or text 988, free and confidential, any hour of any day, for themselves or for someone they are worried about. You do not have to be sure it is serious. Being worried is reason enough to call.

Keep doing what you are doing, keep a closer eye on your daughters and your younger teens, and keep that number somewhere you can find it.