Loneliness, depression, and anxiety are reaching epidemic levels among young Americans, and after pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into mental health care to fight those powerful emotions in and out of the school system, the federal government is asked to pay more.
The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) held a hearing on June 8, to address the rising mental health crisis in America’s youth.
At the hearing titled “Why Are So Many American Youth in a Mental Health Crisis? Exploring Causes and Solutions,” the committee chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) shined a light on the following statistics:
Forty percent of parents reported being “very” or “extremely” worried about their child struggling with either anxiety or depression.
Nearly one in three American teenagers claimed the state of their mental health was poor, with 2/5 teenagers saying they felt “persistently sad or hopeless,” according to a survey from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that included 60 percent girls and 70 percent LGBT youth.
One fifth of American teenagers have seriously considered suicide, according to the survey. Sanders shared that CDC reported suicide as the second leading cause of death among America’s young people aged 10-14 and the third leading cause among American teenagers.
Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) echoed the suicide statistic and quoted the Kaiser Family Foundation, which found that half of young adults aged 18-24 reported having anxiety or depression.
The root cause of this rapid epidemic? According to HELP, it is and increasing sense of loneliness and isolation.
Social Media Concerns Persist
“Our kids have become less connected humanly to each other, and this is kind of a new phenomenon,” said Sanders. “Instead of building trusting, healthy, and strong relationships with their friends, their teachers, and their mentors, an increasing number of kids are turning to their phones and social media to feel connected. And what type of impact [does] that social media have on the mental health of our nation’s youth.”The committee members, each of whom comes from a different place geographically and in the political spectrum, point to the influx of social media.
Sanders quoted another study which stated that 32 percent of teen girls who already felt bad about their bodies said Instagram only made that feeling worse, with 25 percent of all teenage users feeling inadequate or not good enough.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Ct.) quoted a recent study that found within two minutes of starting a TikTok account, a teenager can be fed content glorifying suicide, and within four minutes, they can be provided content celebrating eating disorders.
“What I worry about is that the issue of balance has shifted dramatically,” said Murthy. “Toward online connection, and away from in-person connection, particularly for our kids.”
“But the other concern,” he added, “is not only what kids are missing out on as a result of social media, but what they’re being exposed to on social media. And I talked to parents all over the country and to kids as well who say that they’re exposed to content that’s violent and sexual in nature, that they’re often bullied and harassed online.”
Lockdowns Worsened Mental Health Crisis
America already had a mental health crisis before the controversial events of 2019—2021. Murthy stated that the teen suicide contemplation rate had already experienced a 57 percent increase in the prior decade, and that the time Americans aged 15-24 spent with friends in person had already declined by 50 percent between 2003 and 2019.
The transition was already underway. And then came the pandemic.
“The greatest healthcare mistake the NIH [National Institutes of Health] and CDC ever did was locking our youth out of schools, and that launched this mental health epidemic that we have,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT.), a practicing physician. “Instead of our children talking to their friends, their colleagues, their teachers, or coaches, they talk to social media. That became their best friend.”
According to the CDC’s report, the percentage of teenagers feeling sad or hopeless rose from 37 percent to 42 percent from 2021 to 2022.
How Much Money and Where Is it Going?
Neas explained that the federal government has been allocating a lot of money to fight this crisis in a variety of ways.In 2020 it was reported that $238 billion was spent on mental health.
More recently, according to Neas, those billions included $6 billion in payments to cover school-based health care for Medicaid students in 2021. $1 billion was awarded by the Department of Education in September 2022 to state-level institutions to be used as grant money for “high-need school districts.” In January 2023, two other programs gave $86 million in grants to local communities. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act also provided $1 billion over five years.
The grant programs provide funding to nine states, the District of Columbia, and 94 other school districts across 31 states, and train 14,000 school-based mental health professionals. Meanwhile, she reported that, as of May 18, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program provide health care to over half of American children—roughly 41 million.
“The work that we’ve done with the Department of Health and Human Services to make it easier for schools to access the Medicaid program for school-based services is one that we’re very proud of because we think it’s going to make it easier for schools to hire and sustain necessary people,” Neas said. “At the same time, we’ve been working hand-in-glove with the department to get word out to our school leaders about this time of re-enrollment and hoping that those children who have to re-enroll in Medicaid are found eligible, and that those that are found not eligible can be directed to another source of insurance. But it is something that I think the administration is very concerned about wanting to do everything we can to make sure that children who are eligible can stay on the program.”
Is the Money Helping?
While spending on mental health has increased exponentially ... is it going to do good work? Where is it going, and what spending is working?“So are we tracking the successes and failures of the rest of the billions of dollars that we spend?” asked Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.). “Are we tracking that is where it’s working? ... Is that money helping to the degree where we can see success?”
“Our office ... does not conduct evaluation trials,” Murthy replied. “We do have colleagues across the Department of Health and Human Services at NIH and at SAMSA who do conduct evaluations of programs. So that we understand what’s working, who it’s working for, and ... what’s missing. ”
The Surgeon General referred to some groups that have popped up across the country, directly naming Becoming A Man which originated in Chicago, and the After School Matters program, but failed to provide statistical results of how the funds and grants are directly improving the mental health situation.
Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) called attention to an NIH study called “Psychological Functioning in Transgender Youth After Two Years on Hormones,” during which two participants ended up committing suicide.
He pressed the Surgeon General, asking, “Are you concerned about... sterility and infertility and children who receive these cross-sex hormones and about the negative long-term impacts of these medical interventions on their mental health?”
“Well, Senator, I think whenever you have a medical intervention, it is vital to study both the short and long-term impacts on physical and on mental health,” the Surgeon General replied. “And I think that’s where an investment of resources is needed.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) saw a larger directional problem.
“We have to stop the hemorrhaging,” he remarked. “When a patient comes to the emergency room, when they’re bleeding out, we don’t start pumping blood into them. The first thing we have to do is stop the bleeding. Most of our solutions today seem to be pumping more blood into people. We got to go back and start over.”
Let the Kids Do It
But as politicians debate in the Capital, some voices attempted to inspire the young people in America to find the solution themselves and not wait for the government to figure it out.“I think young people’s part of this sense of hopelessness is this feeling that adults have let us down—whether it’s on climate or guns or political polarization or kids get kicked around by adults for political purposes if they’re marginalized,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) looking right into the camera to address young people watching the hearing. “I look at my own life... and I want to tell you I had the same feeling when I was five through eighteen that the adults in the world were letting us down.”
He mentioned living through JFK’s assassination in 1963, then Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Robert F. Kennedy’s assassinations in 1968. He saw the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, and he was 16 when Richard Nixon was forced to resign the presidency in 1974.
“So my formative life from 5 to 16 was a time of chaos or nuclear weapons drills in the classroom,” he said. “... and there was a palpable feeling that I had, and a lot of my friends had, [that] the adults in the world let us down. And that was a creator of confusion and anxiety and even depression.”
“The lesson that I learned from 5 to 16 was the adults were screwing a lot of things up, and if we waited for adults to solve those things, we'd wait for a very long time. But when the young high schoolers and college kids that I was looking up to as a younger person linked arms and said we’re not going to just wait for adults to fix it. We’re going to get engaged. When young people do that, young people change the direction of the country.”
“You know, the system is rigged so that we don’t matter. Our history shows the opposite. Things get worse when young people don’t engage. [when they do...] Things get better.”
