The 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) shows that roughly 40% of U.S. high school students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year. That number, 39.7% to be precise, represents a slight improvement from the 2021 survey but remains far above levels recorded a decade ago. The picture is one of a youth mental health crisis that may have peaked but hasn’t broken.
The Big Number: 4 in 10 Students Struggling
The CDC’s YRBS is conducted every two years across a nationally representative sample of high school students. In 2023, nearly 40% reported feeling so sad or hopeless almost every day for two or more weeks in a row that they stopped doing some usual activities. This measure, persistent sadness or hopelessness, is the survey’s primary indicator of poor mental health and has been tracked since 2011.
Looking at the 10-year trend from 2013 to 2023, the CDC found clear increases in poor mental health, suicidal thoughts, and suicidal behaviors. While those long-term trajectories are still climbing, the 2023 data offered a rare piece of encouraging news: some metrics improved compared to the 2021 cycle, particularly among female students.
A Modest Improvement for Female Students
Girls consistently report worse mental health outcomes than boys on every measure the YRBS tracks, and 2023 was no exception. But the gap narrowed slightly. The percentage of female students who felt persistently sad or hopeless dropped from 57% in 2021 to 53% in 2023. The share who seriously considered attempting suicide fell from 30% to 27% over the same period.
Those declines are meaningful in a survey that had shown nearly unbroken worsening for a decade. Still, context matters: more than half of all high school girls reported persistent sadness or hopelessness, and more than one in four seriously thought about suicide. The numbers improved, but they remain alarmingly high.
Racism in School and Its Mental Health Toll
For the first time, the 2023 YRBS asked students whether they had ever experienced racism in school. The results were striking, both in how common these experiences were and in how tightly they correlated with mental health problems.
Among Asian students, 56.9% reported having experienced racism in school. Multiracial students followed at 48.8%, Black students at 45.9%, and Hispanic or Latino students at 39.4%. White students reported the lowest rate at 17.3%.
Across every racial and ethnic group, students who had experienced racism showed significantly higher rates of poor mental health and suicidal behavior compared to peers of the same background who had not. The pattern was remarkably consistent:
- American Indian or Alaska Native students who experienced racism were about twice as likely to report poor mental health (53.3% vs. 25.2%) and more than twice as likely to have seriously considered suicide (42.2% vs. 18.6%). Their suicide attempt rate was nearly triple that of AI/AN students who hadn’t experienced racism: 20.4% versus 7.5%.
- Asian students who experienced racism reported persistent sadness or hopelessness at more than double the rate of those who hadn’t (43.1% vs. 18.8%). They were about three times as likely to have seriously considered or attempted suicide.
- Black students who experienced racism reported persistent sadness at 51.1% compared to 29.9% among those who hadn’t. Suicide attempts were more than three times higher: 15.2% versus 4.7%.
- Hispanic or Latino students showed a similar pattern. Those who experienced racism reported persistent sadness at 58.5% versus 32.5%, and suicide attempts at 16.7% versus 7.0%.
- White students who experienced racism also showed elevated rates, though the gap was narrower. Persistent sadness was reported by 55.2% of those who experienced racism compared to 36.2% who did not.
These findings don’t prove that racism directly causes mental health problems in a clinical sense, but the association is large, consistent, and present across every group studied. The strongest links appeared for suicidal behavior: in several groups, students who experienced racism were two to three times more likely to have attempted suicide.
Long-Term Trends Still Point Upward
The 2021-to-2023 dip in some indicators is welcome, but it hasn’t reversed the broader trajectory. The CDC noted that 10-year trends from 2013 to 2023 continued to show increases in violence exposure, signs of poor mental health, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. In other words, the situation today is better than the pandemic-era peak but substantially worse than a decade ago.
This framing matters for how you interpret the numbers. A drop from 57% to 53% in persistent sadness among girls looks like progress when compared to 2021. It looks like a crisis when compared to the roughly 36% rate recorded among girls in 2013. Both readings are accurate. The mental health of high school students improved slightly but remains at historically elevated levels.
What the Data Can and Can’t Tell You
The YRBS is a self-reported survey, not a clinical assessment. Students answer anonymous questionnaires in school, and the results reflect how they describe their own experiences. That means the data captures the breadth of distress across a population, not diagnoses. A student who reports persistent sadness may or may not meet the clinical criteria for depression.
The survey also can’t explain why trends are moving in a particular direction. It documents what is happening (more students reporting poor mental health over 10 years, a slight easing from 2021 to 2023) without isolating causes. Researchers have pointed to social media, academic pressure, the pandemic, political polarization, and economic stress as potential contributors, but the YRBS itself doesn’t test those hypotheses.
What the 2023 data does provide is a detailed, nationally representative snapshot showing that the mental health of American high school students remains under significant strain. The modest improvements from 2021 suggest the situation is not locked in a permanent upward spiral, but the levels of sadness, hopelessness, and suicidal thinking reported by teens today are unlike anything recorded in earlier cycles of this survey.