When she was 11 years old, Maddie felt a crippling despair and loneliness that rendered her daily existence almost unbearable. She was already the target of significant bullying when a fellow student took a picture of her, photoshopping her head onto the body of a dog. Maddie had felt confident in that photo, sporting a dress and a hairstyle that she loved. Now classmates at her school in Houston, Texas, were making their own edits of the picture, changing its color and enlarging her head.
“It was very embarrassing and tragic for me,” Maddie, now 23, recalled. “I was already being bullied at school, and now I’m coming home, and I see this, and so it felt like it didn’t end.”
The tormenting by her peers continued into middle school. In an environment that punishes individuality, Maddie—who asked that only her first name be used to preserve anonymity—was unabashedly quirky, wearing bow ties and suspenders along with her school uniform. As she wryly noted a decade later, this defiant sense of self did not help her avoid bullying. Maddie is Black, and she felt as if she needed to hide her struggles because of stigma toward mental illness that she believes is still pervasive within the Black community.
Plagued by frequent panic attacks and overwhelmed with depression, she turned to Crisis Text Line, a secure service that offers support for people experiencing severe emotional or psychological distress. The volunteer counselors on the other end of the line, who are trained in crisis response, taught her breathing exercises and grounding techniques to help manage these painful experiences.
“Around the time I was, like, 12 [years old], I didn’t think I was going to make it to 16. When I made it to 16, I didn’t think I was going to make it to 18, and so in between 12 and 16 I made myself a promise that if I lived to be 18 years old, I would volunteer at Crisis Text Line,” Maddie recalled. That goal helped sustain her until she arrived at the University of Texas at Austin as a freshman, and she signed up to become a volunteer for the text line.
But Maddie was quickly overwhelmed by the academic demands and financial pressures of college, which only exacerbated the mental health challenges related to her then-undiagnosed bipolar disorder. As she struggled, academic advisers told her that maybe she was not cut out for the rigors of college, without offering sufficient resources for support.
In 2023, when she was a junior, she made a suicide plan, although she ultimately decided not to attempt. On the very night she had planned to take her life, a student who lived in the building across the street from hers died by suicide, and Maddie witnessed the aftermath. She was admitted to the hospital for the first time that night and was hospitalized another two times within a year after the first stay. Thankfully, she had friends who helped coordinate her treatment, but even acknowledging that the situation was serious enough to warrant assistance was difficult.
“I wanted to keep pushing through. I wanted to feel like I had everything together, that I could handle it, that I didn’t need help,” she recalled. “That year of hospitalizations was honestly the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. Getting that type of help was very, very scary to me … even though I had always told people, like, ‘If you need help, reach out for help.’”
Maddie has continued to process her trauma through writing, and particularly poetry. In one poem, entitled “The Day I Planned To Kill Myself,” she outlines the anguish she felt in the months before and after that experience. She wonders, “How many academic advisors have co-authored a student’s suicide?”
Maddie’s specific experiences are emblematic of the challenges felt by many young Americans contending with the inescapable torment of cyberbullying, a stressful academic environment, cultural stigmatization of mental health issues, and interactions with social media that aggravate a sense of isolation. And recent actions by the current administration and Congress—for example, threatening funding for mental health research and cutting key social safety net benefits—could put young people struggling with their mental health at risk.
In her poem, Maddie recalls two younger college students in the hospital seeking her guidance. She writes:
The second time I am in the hospital,
six months after the day I didn’t kill myself,
I am joined by a freshman and a sophomore, looking up to me, asking if life gets better.
And I feel like the leader of an army band,
preparing young soldiers to die, and I so badly want to shake them.
Want someone to shake me and say:
“Debt is not worth your life.”
“Your parent’s ‘sacrifice’ is not worth your life.”
“The fear of failure is not worth your life.”
“College is not worth your life!”
“Your life is worth it.
You are worth it, and you don’t
have to walk across that damn stage.
But please,
walk out of here
alive!”
A National Crisis
Since the height of the coronavirus pandemic, during which many schools and colleges closed their doors to in-person learning for months at a time, there has been a general consensus among medical experts that the kids are not all right.
“What a lot of young people are telling us is that there’s just high levels of anxiety and depression and stress, more so than we’ve seen with other generations,” said Courtney Gallo Hunter, the then vice president of public policy and advocacy at Crisis Text Line. Where adults might feel stress about weighty topics such as economic instability, political division, climate change, and systemic discrimination, teenagers—who already feel the impact of life events so deeply, from the stress of homework to first crushes—are experiencing those same concerns with higher intensity.
Although the trend of declining youth mental health predated the pandemic, the loss of social opportunities in 2020 and 2021 highlighted the ways in which members of Generations Z and Alpha face different challenges than their predecessors. Young people became more reliant on social media for connection, as they were prevented from interacting with friends and attending school in person; this was associated with a commensurate uptick in depressive episodes and thoughts of suicide. In December 2021, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory warning of the “devastating” effects of declining youth mental health.
After lockdowns concluded, there was some improvement, evidenced by a decrease in suicidal ideation among adolescents and young adults since 2021. But the situation remains grim, as millions of young Americans struggle with their mental health and a pervasive sense of isolation.
“Social connectedness is not like what it used to be. People will spend time together, but they’re on their phones. They’re not making eye contact. They’re not sharing that social connection that is so important in every human being,” said Ana Tueme Lezama, a 24-year-old clinician living in Boston who volunteers with Crisis Text Line.
In 2023, suicide was the second-leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 10 and 34. A recent survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that in 2025 around 15 percent of youth between ages 12 and 17 reported having a major depressive episode in the previous year, and roughly 10 percent had serious thoughts of suicide. Around 11 percent of adults aged 18 to 25—among whom Maddie can be counted—had serious thoughts of suicide during the previous year.
The root causes of mental health issues among young people are varied and intertwined, making it difficult to tease out any particular problem that, once fixed, would lead to an immediate and universal cessation in internal psychological hostilities. But if one were to braid the fine strands of these roots into a single prescription—say, for the purposes of an explanatory magazine article—it may be this: Adolescents and young adults exist in a world where they lack suffic