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Teen girls have increased mental health concerns due to violence and sadness, CDC says

"Our teenage girls are suffering through an overwhelming wave of violence and trauma, and it’s affecting their mental health."

Photo by Dev Asangbam on Unsplash

Teen girls have increased mental health concerns, CDC says.

Editor's Note: If you are having thoughts about taking your own life, or know of anyone who is in need of help, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is a United States-based suicide prevention network of over 200+ crisis centers that provides 24/7 service via a toll-free hotline with the number 9-8-8. It is available to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress.


The mental health of teens has been widely discussed over the past few years. Lockdowns early in the pandemic put a much greater emphasis on teens and their social-emotional development and highlighted how isolation contributes to mental health concerns. But as things returned to normal, or as normal as they can be, the teen mental health crisis didn't seem to let up.

Now, the CDC is saying the crisis is actually getting worse, specifically for teen girls. In the fall of 2021, the CDC conducted its Youth Risk Behavior Survey and the results are in: A startling 57% of teen girls—nearly 3 in 5—reported feeling "persistently sad or hopeless," while 30% said they had seriously considered dying by suicide, an increase of 60% since 2011. These numbers are the highest they've been in the last decade, according to the CDC.

The Youth Risk Behavior Survey has been conducted every other year for the past 30 years and includes the responses of 17,232 high school students living in the United States, so the new data is concerning.

Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, told NBC News, "Our teenage girls are suffering through an overwhelming wave of violence and trauma, and it’s affecting their mental health." According to the CDC data, there has been a dramatic increase in violence against teen girls reported, with 1 in 5 saying they experienced sexual violence within the past year. And 14% of teen girls reported being forced into having sex, which is an increase from 2019.


This survey doesn't discount the mental health struggles of teen boys. It simply shows that teenaged girls are showing an elevated response. In fact, overall more than 40% of boys and girls reported feeling so sad and hopeless that it interfered with their schoolwork or extracurricular activities.

And teenagers that identified as part of the LGBTQ community were even more likely to report mental health struggles. Rates of suicidal thoughts among LGBTQ youth continue to be staggering with 45% seriously considering suicide in the past year. They are also more than four times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers. According to the CDC, 22% of LGBTQ youth attempted suicide in the past year.

Open and honest communication with teens about mental health and mental health resources can be helpful. As a therapist, I encourage parents to make sure their kids have crisis hotlines stored in their phone, like 988 and the Trevor Project numbers, 1-866-488-7386 for calls and 678-678 for text.

Because here's the thing, teens are notoriously private and are likely to tell their friends they're struggling before they inform their parents. It's important for them to have the tools to make those connections when they need it most. In fact, the CDC numbers do not show an actual increase in acts of violence or harassment against teens. Rather, they show teens are reporting incidents at a greater frequency. But there is still likely a significant gap between incidents that occur and those that are reported.

The teen years are hard for a lot of reasons, but with the increase of violence against girls, it's hitting them a little harder. Being there to support them through this time without judgment, even when you don't understand, can be a big help.

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Donald Trump Jr. used real CDC data to draw an absolutely ridiculous conclusion

In the misinformation age, it's important to understand that not all misinformation is fake. Some of it fabricated out of thin air, but more often than not, it includes legitimate data that is either misread, misunderstood, or misrepresented.

Such is the case with Donald Trump Jr.'s ridiculous claim on Fox News that COVID-19 deaths are

"These people are truly morons," Trump Jr. said without a hint of irony, before explaining to Ingraham how we "went through the CDC data" and came to the conclusion that the COVID-19 death number "is almost nothing." He said, "We've gotten control of this thing, we understand how it works, they have the therapeutics to be able to death with this."

"Look at my Instagram," he added. "It's gone to almost nothing."

Anyone who pays any attention at all to daily death tolls from the virus knows that the idea that deaths are "almost nothing" is simply false on its face. We have regularly had between 500 and 1000 deaths per day for months, and those numbers have begun to climb again in recent weeks. In fact we had over 1000 deaths yesterday, the day he tried to make this claim. So what the hell is Jr. talking about?

We could just brush him off as an idiot and move along, but the problem is there are millions of people who will watch, listen, and believe him. He says his numbers are from the CDC, after all. So let's take a look at what he shared on his Instagram.

Looking at the first chart he shared of weekly death numbers, we see that deaths spiked, dropped, went back up in the summer, then have tapered off since—but with a huge drop in the past few weeks.

The second chart puts those weekly death numbers up against the weekly case counts. Judging by this chart, it appears that while cases have gone up (because of more testing, according to Jr., which is only very partially true) deaths have plummeted.

So what's going on here?

The data Jr. is using is the CDC's weekly provisional death count, not the current recorded death count. And that distinction makes his conclusion 100% wrong.

The CDC provisional death count only counts a death once death certificate paperwork is fully processed. That process can take anywhere from one to eight weeks, which is clearly explained on the CDC website that Jr. got the data from. So the most recent weeks in his chart aren't up-to-date at all.

There's even a big blue box at the top of the page that says, "Note: Provisional death counts are based on death certificate data received and coded by the National Center for Health Statistics as of October 30, 2020. Death counts are delayed and may differ from other published sources (see Technical Notes). Counts will be updated periodically."

In fact, if you look at the numbers posted today for the last two months compared to the numbers in his chart, they've all gone up, because more death certificates for those weeks have been processed. That's how this chart works. The data is incomplete, especially in recent weeks.

So yeah, Jr. is using real CDC data, but he's drawing completely the wrong conclusion from it.

Now, perhaps that's a result of not understanding it (which is a problem if you are going on national television as a mouthpiece for the White House during a pandemic). Perhaps it's a result of neglecting to read the whole web page and just pulling numbers from the chart (which is also a problem if you're trying to speak authoritatively while calling other people morons). Or perhaps it's an intentional misrepresentation (which is a problem for obvious reasons, not the least of which is that it could lead to more dead Americans).

While it's tempting to lean toward Don Jr.'s incompetence, there's one detail that makes me wonder if it was purposeful. Donald Trump Jr. shared this information on his Instagram, but not on Facebook (at least not that I could find). The reason that's suspect is that people can't click on links on Instagram. In fact, if they're using the mobile app, which is how the vast majority of people use Instagram, you can't even copy and paste the links, so it's very difficult to get to the website he cites. On Facebook, the CDC links in his share text would have shown up as clickable links, and maybe—just maybe—some of his readers would bother checking his accuracy for themselves.

People using the provisional death count erroneously isn't new. I wrote about it several months ago, when a claim kept going around that the CDC had lowered its death count. It hadn't. People were just confusing the provisional death count numbers with the real-time death count and running with their conspiracy theories.

So when Trump Jr. shares his charts and asks on Instagram, "Why isn't the ACTUAL data from the CDC being discussed?" he needs to know that it is. This data just isn't what he thinks it is.

And when he says, "I guess they can't rule you with fear if they tell you the truth," I just want to bang my head on my desk and then burn down the entire internet so that we don't have to be subjected to the Trump family's misinformation and absurd gaslighting any longer.

Happy voting, everyone.

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No, the CDC did not drop its COVID-19 death count to 37,000. In fact, it didn't 'revise' it at all.

Photo by Dimitri Karastelev on Unsplash

I'm losing count of how many times in the past few days I've seen someone post something along the lines of this tweet:

"The CDC has actually ADMITTED that they overcounted COVID-19 deaths!"

"Look at the numbers—they're right there on the CDC website plain as day!"

"See, it's all overblown! We did this whole shutdown thing and tanked the economy for nothing!"

First of all, no, the CDC did not revise anything. Let's dive into these numbers because they actually are a bit confusing when you don't read the whole page (and frankly, some parts are a little confusing even if you do—get it together, CDC).

There are different methods of counting COVID-19 deaths, and the CDC's website includes numbers for two very different methods. We have:

1) The official CDC death count, which you can find on the CDC's home page. This count comes directly from public health departments in each state and territory daily. As of the writing of this article, that count stands at 68,279.

2) The Provisional Death Count, which is where that ~37,000 number comes from. This count comes from the National Vital Statistics System—the system that processes and logs death certificates. The notable thing about the Provisional Death Count is that it's not up-to-date. The CDC site itself states that the numbers on the Provisional Death chart lag weeks behind other counts:

"It is important to note that it can take several weeks for death records to be submitted to National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), processed, coded, and tabulated. Therefore, the data shown on this page may be incomplete, and will likely not include all deaths that occurred during a given time period, especially for the more recent time periods. Death counts for earlier weeks are continually revised and may increase or decrease as new and updated death certificate data are received from the states by NCHS. COVID-19 death counts shown here may differ from other published sources, as data currently are lagged by an average of 1–2 weeks."

Here's a real-world example of what this looks like:

This is a screenshot of the Provisional Death Count as of April 16, 2020 (which you can access at this CDC link). As you can see, the COVID death count for the week of 4/11/20 was 3,542.

And here is the Provisional Death Count as of the writing of this article, which you can view in real time at this CDC link. As you can see, the week of 4/11/20 has been updated from 3,542 deaths to 12,628—a nearly four-fold increase since the April 16 publication.

When the numbers were published on 4/16/20, there were still 9,086 death certificates that hadn't been processed yet from the week prior—that's what they mean by a lag. Three weeks later, the numbers are very different.

So that 37,000 total (well, 39,000 right now) will change as the death certificates get processed. The Provisional Death Count simply isn't accurate yet. And the lag means it will never be an up-to-date count, so it's not a reliable source for current death numbers.

The problem is that people have been sharing the not-up-to-date Provisional Death Count link as a way to make it sound like the COVID-19 death numbers are actually smaller. They are not.

It's worth noting that all COVID-19 death counts include both lab-confirmed and "presumed" COVID-19 deaths. This has also been a source of confusion, not to mention conspiracy. But "presumed" doesn't mean just a wild guess.

Test results for coronavirus have a high false negative rate—from 5% to 30%—according to Dr. Alan Wells, professor of pathology at University of Pittsburgh. So relying solely on positive lab test results for COVID deaths would miss thousands. At this point, doctors and medical examiners can generally recognize clear COVID symptoms in a critically ill or deceased patient, and if a patient meets the clinical, epidemiological, or vital records criteria for the COVID being the cause of death, that's considered "presumed."

Each state has different requirements for coding COVID-19 deaths, and it's generally a very small percentage that are counted as "presumed."

Adding to the confusion on this front, Dr. Birx, from the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said that the U.S. was taking a "liberal" approach to counting COVID-19 deaths, and ""The intent is, right now, that . . . if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death."

People unfortunately did not take that statement in the context of underlying conditions, which is what Dr. Birx was talking about. Here's what she actually said:

"There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition and let's say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem -- some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. Right now ... if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that as a COVID-19 death."

If a person has a heart condition and they get sick with COVID-19 and die, COVID is counted as a cause of their death, even if they died of a heart attack—the reasonable assumption being that the disease led the patient's weakened heart to give in. Dr. Birx did not mean that a gunshot victim or a fatal car accident victim would be certified as a COVID-19 death just because they tested positive for the disease. That would be silly, not to mention illegal.

Read more on how COVID-19 deaths are counted from a forensic pathologist here.

You can also see an email from the Louisiana Health Department specifying how doctors are to log coronavirus deaths here:

So, no, COVID-19 death counts have not been revised downward, nor are they artificially inflated. In fact, it's more likely that they've been undercounted than overcounted, since only deaths that had been confirmed by tests were being counted for at least the first month of the outbreak in the U.S.

More importantly, read the fine print on a website before you make any assumptions about what you're seeing. Health data tracking can be a confusing to dive into under normal circumstances, much less during a novel virus pandemic where we're all learning as we go.

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A fiery rant about workplace etiquette during flu season is going ... viral.

Former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett has a problem with how we handle flu season in the U.S.

During a recent taping of his podcast, "Lovett or Leave It," Lovett touched on a topic we're not actually hearing a whole lot about: the current flu epidemic. The flu — which experts say is the worst in nearly a decade and has already racked up a modest body count — is an issue that's not getting much attention.

Enter Crooked Media co-founder Lovett. He's fired up about this year's flu, and we should all should hear him out. (Just a warning: some NSFW language.)

GIFs from Lovett or Leave It/Facebook.

If you are sick, do not go to work. This is how you spread germs.

"You show up at work and you're sick — fuck you, ok?" he says, bluntly. "If you have a job with paid sick leave and you can work at home, you work at home. If you wake up achy and with a fever, don't go to the office and see how it goes. You're going to give people the fucking flu."

He's totally right. Staying home from work (or from school) when you're sick is actually the first thing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests. In fact, they take it a step further, suggesting you stay home even if you're not yet sick, but someone else in your household is.

Other important reminders include covering coughs and sneezes, washing your hands, and wearing a mask if you're out in public. (Yes, I know it can look goofy as hell, but it's for the greater good, people.)

Americans are weird when it comes to work. We've been taught to tough it out and that showing up when we're sick is part of being a team player.

It needs to change, and we can start with how we praise kids for perfect attendance at school. Going to school or work when you're sick is actually a profoundly selfish thing to do. Unless you're Michael Jordan hopping in a time machine to drop 38 points on the Utah Jazz in the 1997 NBA Finals, you need to stay in bed. As only he can, Lovett explains:

"You going is about proving you're the kind of person who powers through. It's not about being a team player, it's about you, and it's a weird performance, and people shouldn't go to work sick. It's bullshit. It's treated like, 'Oh yeah, what a tough person.' Fuck you. Go home. You are a contagious thing. Your mucous membranes don't know how much you care about your work. They don't give a shit."

It's time we got with the rest of the world and implemented mandatory paid sick leave.

Many people living paycheck-to-paycheck or working an hourly, low-wage job often don't have the ability to call in sick. Many countries — the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Mexico, and many, many more — mandate that employers offer their workers paid time off for sickness, but not here in the U.S.

The CDC (funded by the federal government) recommends that individuals do something that the federal government won't act on. If the government saw public health issues as a true priority, they'd enact policies that would allow people — especially hourly workers, some of whom might be handling your food — to take time off when they need it. A few states have taken it upon themselves to require companies to offer paid time off, and several companies have decided it's a benefit worth offering all employees, but Congress should pass a bill making it a requirement nationwide.

"We never cover cause and effect," Lovett says, referring to why a wealthy country like the U.S. gets hammered by diseases year after year. "We never talk about the system."

Watch Lovett's inspired, fiery rant below.

For more information on what you can do to help prevent the spread of the flu, visit the CDC's website (and, seriously, get a flu shot).

Don't show up for work sick. It's bullshit.

"Showing up to work sick is not about being a team player, it's about you, and it's a weird performance... Fuck you, go home"https://go.crooked.com/mVWX8K

Posted by Lovett or Leave It on Friday, January 26, 2018
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