Being a teenager today is measurably harder than it was for earlier generations, and their rising distress is not just louder complaining.
That is the conclusion of an independent UK review into mental health, autism and ADHD services, chaired by clinical psychologist Professor Peter Fonagy of University College London.
Speaking to the BBC as the review lands, Fonagy said the "snowflake generation" framing is wrong.
Around one in four 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK are now struggling with their mental health, he said, with anxiety, depression, self-harm and eating disorders the most common problems.
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What the review actually found
The review was ordered by UK health secretary Wes Streeting after he suggested young people were being over-diagnosed and "written off." Its main finding pushes back on that idea.
Peter Fonagy argues that greater awareness and reduced stigma explain some of the increase in help-seeking, but not most of it. The underlying suffering, he says, has grown.
He points to a mix of pressures. Those include economic and employment uncertainty, less face-to-face contact, disrupted sleep, loneliness that has been rising since 2000, and the fallout from the pandemic. Social media sits on top of that stack.
What the US numbers show
US data lines up with the picture from the UK review. In the CDC's 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 40 percent of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the previous year. Among girls, that figure was 53 percent.
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Among students identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning, it was 65 percent.
The numbers dipped slightly from the peak in 2021, when overall persistent sadness sat at 42 percent and reached 57 percent among girls.
Even the slight improvement leaves rates well above where they were a decade earlier.
The social media use
The US Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on social media and youth mental health reported that up to 95 percent of youth ages 13 to 17 use a social media platform.
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More than a third say they use it "almost constantly." The advisory cited longitudinal research linking more than three hours of daily social media use to a doubled risk of poor mental health outcomes, including depression and anxiety symptoms.
The advisory did not conclude that social media alone is causing the crisis. It called the evidence sufficient to act on rather than sufficient to declare social media safe for developing brains.
What it means for parents, schools and clinicians
The takeaway from the UK review is not that today's teens are fragile, but that the environment they are growing up in has changed. That reframes the response.
If distress is genuine, dismissing it as a labeling problem risks pushing struggling young people further from care.
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Fonagy has been open about his own history. As a teenager who moved from Hungary to London without his parents, he had suicidal thoughts and credits therapy at a local service with saving his life.
For families, that means treating a teenager's sadness, anxiety or withdrawal as a real signal, not a phase to be ridden out. Parents or young adults worried about persistent low mood, self-harm or eating patterns should raise it with a primary care doctor.
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This article is made and published by Ida-Marie Palm Varbæk, who may have used AI in the preparation.