Amid Record Rates of Teen Suicidal Ideations, We Need a Cultural Shift to Take Mental Health Seriously Again

Content Note: This article discusses topics that may be disturbing to some readers, including references to suicide and mental health.

In April of last year, a classmate jumped off the third floor balcony of our school, four hours after classes were let out. The student survived—but the injuries they sustained rendered them unable to return to school, and I couldn’t help but ask myself whether that was a blessing for them, not having to return. Barely a month later, everything at school seemed to have gone back to normal, as if nothing had ever happened at all. 

That response is indicative of a larger cultural shift away from making space for mental health awareness. Despite the rising number of teenagers struggling with poor mental health, we’ve been normalizing going back to normal. By doing so, we’re letting teens suffer in silence, until their mental ailments fester into tragic headlines. But to prevent cases like my classmate’s, we need to actually do the opposite: to normalize talking about mental health again, to validate people’s struggles so they can get help before it’s too late. For teens like me, who have endured the pandemic only to start high school in the age of ultra-competitive college admissions, the stakes couldn’t be higher: if we continue dismissing our suffering, mental illness is bound to quietly wreck havoc on my generation. 

The suicide attempt at school unfortunately was far from an isolated incident—it happens daily with students across the nation, and it’s getting worse. Between 2011 and 2021, the percentage of students who said they were persistently feeling hopeless and sad increased by 50 percent, according to the National Institutes for Mental Health. In 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that two in ten students seriously considered suicide, with one in ten having attempted suicide. By 2025, teens reported record levels of suicidal thoughts, according to Mental Health America.  

At the same time,  the very structures that help prevent suicide and contribute to better mental health overall—such as healthy social bonds and a healthy balance between work and rest—have fallen by the wayside in our era of ultracompetitive academics. Hanging out with friends and getting rest are the first things to fall by the wayside when you spend every waking moment of your life on extracurriculars, grades, and whatever else you might be able to do to elevate yourself in the eyes of a college admissions committee. At my school, there’s an understanding that just being good at school will put you in the bottom tier. Two extracurriculars, volunteering for non-profits, and tutoring are the bare minimum—and yet, even if you try as hard as physically possible, there’s still a large chance you won’t get into the college you want. The result is a consistent Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads.  

Even if we’re able to recognize and name the dread we feel, we’ve been conditioned to look the other way. While the 2010s to the early 2020s saw the spread of progressive ideals, ranging from accepting different body types to the success of campaigns like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, the dominant cultural narrative from somewhere around quarantine onwards has shifted to a more conservative viewpoint. We’re seeing the skyrocketing of Ozempic and the return of Hollywood’s “skinny girl,” the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the popularity of toxic-masculinity podcasts, and a widespread perception of Gen-Z as overdramatic cry babies. The conversation around mental health, likewise, has pivoted from awareness and accommodation toward questioning the validity of diagnoses. Do you really have depression, ADHD, or BPD, or are you just being dramatic? 

In this environment, the solutions we have for preventing and addressing mental illness are failing not because they’re ineffective; they’re failing because we’re unwilling to use them. My high school has a “swellness room” on the second floor, with glass walls and a couch in the center. But no one uses it, and that’s not because there aren’t any people struggling in our school. It’s because the “swellness room” has become more punchline than life raft: “Are you gonna go cry in the swellness room?” is a common chorus, usually accompanied by giggles if not outright laughter.

So what do we need? We need a cultural shift back toward taking mental illness seriously. One way to achieve this could be by taking a page out of the campaign for sexual assault awareness: This year, California’s Consent Assembly program came to our school to share the real life stories of sexual assault victims, from ages 12 to 18. Hearing the stories of real teenagers from California changed how I thought about sexual assault; it made me feel like it was something we could talk about and acknowledge openly. We need the same kind of shift in our conversation around mental health, and an assembly for suicide prevention might be a great first step to get us there.

But changing the conversation offline is only one part of the solution; we need to change the conversation online, too. Social media played a large role in the shift toward dismissing mental illness, but it also holds vast potential for swinging the pendulum back. I believe social media companies in particular have a responsibility to increase the visibility of content that promotes mental wellness instead of simply pushing clips based on engagement rates. And if social media companies don’t want to do so, policymakers must force a change. 

Cultural shifts are difficult to ignite. But in our current environment, they’re the single most important thing we can do to make sure we fight the mental health crisis that is destroying so many brilliant minds of my generation. Let’s stop normalizing going back to normal—and treat mental illness with the attention and care my classmate, as well as all struggling teens, deserve. 

If you have been affected by any of the subjects in this article, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK  to 741741.

Caroline Leong is a junior in high school whose interests include mental health, philosophy, and ethics. She enjoys exploring how culture and ideas influence individuals, communities, and public discourse.