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Fashion: 2023 Color of the Year
By Cassie Beer, Women’s Fund Director Research continues to identify increases in anxiety, depression, and other mental health concerns among teenagers. The Women & Girls of Greater Fort Wayne 2020 Study revealed that Allen County girls were more than twice as likely to have made a plan for suicide than boys. Our study also found that 48% of middle and high school girls report feeling sad and hopeless.
New CDC research reveals that teenage girls are attempting to end their life at devastating rates, citing a 50% increase in girls being admitted to the hospital for suspected suicide attempts in the last two years. The same report also indicates a 55% rise in eating disorders, a 38% rise in depression diagnoses, and a 33% rise in anxiety disorders. It’s a difficult time to be a teenager: increased social media pressures, academic expectations, limited access to mental health services, economic instability, social unrest. Almost 40% of girls who spend five hours a day on social media show symptoms of depression. Time spent on social media is directly correlated with suffering from low moods, depression, being unhappy with how one looks, and getting less than seven hours of sleep a night
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One participant in the Women’s Fund Young Women & Girls Study shared, “Sometimes I feel that I will never be good enough, that I need to change myself in order to be accepted by society. This can keep me up at night sometimes because the only thing that I really value is being a part of a group…and having strong friendships. It’s hard to have that if you feel like you’re not good enough.” Another participant shared that she used to spend close to ten hours a day on social media until she realized how much worse it made her feel to see a never-ending stream of perfectly-edited highlights of others’ lives. In our survey, 86% of respondents indicated that they feel pressured to change their appearance. According to the 2022 Mental Health America report, 2.5 million youth in the U.S. have severe depression, and multiracial youth are at the greatest risk– 60% of whom do not receive any mental health treatment. The good news for Indiana is that we are one of only nine states in the nation that have adopted 998: the first nationwide telephone number to help people with any behavioral health crisis 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The good news is that today’s teenagers are far more likely to have conversations about mental health than previous generations. If we can individually be willing to have the hard conversations to normalize mental health, we can collectively help youth thrive. a
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Attend members-only events to meet other individuals united for a common goal
Visit womensfundfw.org for more information! What next steps can we take?
• Set clear boundaries around social media for your whole family • Discuss unrealistic expectations social media can portray • Normalize conversations about mental health • Support mental health programs in schools: many students only receive mental health services in educational settings
she glows
