Why Teen Mental Health Is Finally Getting Better

Four states released their 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey results within about two and a half weeks of each other this August — New Hampshire, Vermont, North Carolina, Maryland — and every single one of them told the same story. Teen depression is down. Hopelessness is down. Vaping, drinking, and marijuana use are down. Not flat. Down, and down by a lot, from the worst point of the pandemic era.

I’ve written a few of these posts where the data is a warning. This one isn’t. This is the good news, and I want you to actually notice it, because good news about your generation’s mental health doesn’t get the same headlines the bad news does.

The short version

State	What the 2025 survey found	Source
New Hampshire	26% report poor mental health most or all of the time — down 10 points from 2021. Persistent sadness or hopelessness down about 10% from 2021 too	NHPR, Aug. 26, 2026
Vermont	1 in 4 high schoolers report poor mental health, down from 1 in 3 in 2023. Vaping, alcohol, and marijuana use all declined	VTDigger, Aug. 27, 2026
North Carolina	Persistent sadness or hopelessness fell to 29.7%, down from a pandemic-era peak of 43.4% in 2021. School safety also improved	EdNC, WRAL, Aug. 2026
Maryland	Persistent sadness fell to 31.7%, down from 39.2% in 2021–22, alongside declines in vaping and substance use	Maryland Dept. of Health, Aug. 2026

Read that table again, slower this time. Four states. Different regions, different politics, different school systems. Same direction, same magnitude. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s not a fluke in one dataset — that’s a real trend showing up everywhere researchers are bothering to measure it.

Four states, one week, the same story

New Hampshire’s Department of Health and Human Services surveyed nearly 11,740 students across roughly 80 high schools and found suicide consideration dropped from about 25% of students in 2021 to around 16% now. Commissioner Lori Weaver put it plainly: teens are “telling us directly that they’re feeling more supported, more hopeful, and more connected.” Vermont’s Department of Health surveyed more than 15,000 students and found vaping cut nearly in half, marijuana use down to 18%, drinking down to 22%. North Carolina hit its lowest alcohol and drug use numbers in 20 years of tracking. Maryland credited part of its improvement directly to state-funded youth mental health programs.

None of these are small surveys with a shaky sample. They’re built the same way the CDC’s national Youth Risk Behavior Survey is built — anonymous, in schools, thousands of kids per state — which is exactly why four of them landing in the same direction, in the same month, matters more than any one of them would alone.

Is teen mental health actually getting better nationally?

The state numbers line up with what the CDC’s own national data shows. Nationally, persistent sadness or hopelessness among U.S. high schoolers climbed from 36.7% in 2019 to 42% in 2021 — the sharpest jump the survey had ever recorded, driven by the isolation, disrupted routines, and canceled everything of the pandemic years. Here’s what the new state data adds to that national picture:

The 2021 number was a spike, not a new normal. Every state that’s released 2025 data so far shows a real pullback from that peak, not a plateau at the top.
The decline is broad, not one metric moving in isolation. Sadness, suicidal thoughts, vaping, drinking, and marijuana use are all dropping together in the same states, which points to something structural improving, not a single number getting redefined.
It’s happening across very different states. A rural New England state, a Mid-Atlantic state, and a large Southern state all show the same shape of recovery, which makes “this is just one district getting lucky” a hard case to make.
Officials aren’t claiming victory — they’re claiming progress. Every one of these releases pairs the good news with a caution that the recovery isn’t finished or evenly spread. That restraint is itself a signal the data is being read honestly.

If you only remember one thing from this post, remember this: for the first time since the pandemic hit, the national trendline everyone got used to — worse every year — broke, and it broke in more than one place at once.

The gains aren’t landing on everyone the same way

Here’s the part I don’t want you to skip past, because it’s the part that keeps this from being a simple “everything’s fine now” story. Every state that released this data flagged the same caveat: the improvement is real, but it isn’t reaching every kid equally.

In Vermont, girls remain more than twice as likely as boys to report poor mental health. LGBTQ+ students there report significantly worse outcomes — advocates point to bullying, harassment, and daily misgendering as the driver, not their identity itself. Students with disabilities showed the same disproportionate struggle. North Carolina found something similar: LGBTQ+ students still report meaningfully higher sadness and lower safety than their peers, even as the overall gap has narrowed a little, and students earning D’s and F’s report sadness and disconnection at more than double the rate of A students.

I want to be straight with you about what that means. If you’re a straight kid getting good grades, this data is genuinely encouraging news about the world you’re growing up in. If you’re queer, or you’re one of the kids struggling academically, or you’re navigating a disability at school, the “teens are doing better” headline might not match what your Tuesday actually feels like — and that gap between the average and your own experience is worth naming out loud instead of assuming something’s wrong with you for still struggling. The world telling you things are improving on average doesn’t cancel out the specific week you’re having.

What’s actually driving the turnaround

Health officials in these releases were careful not to hand this to a single cause, and I think that restraint is correct. A few things appear to be doing the work together.

Distance from the pandemic itself. The sharpest jump in sadness and hopelessness happened in 2021 — the isolation, the remote school, the canceled everything. Every year further from that stretch gives a teenage nervous system more room to recalibrate against something closer to normal life.

Targeted state investment. Maryland was explicit that part of its improvement traces to state-funded youth mental health programs, not just time passing. New Hampshire and Vermont both point to expanded school-based mental health support built in the years since 2021.

A ceiling effect on substance use. Vaping, drinking, and marijuana use were already trending down among teens before the pandemic in most of these states. That decline that started with alcohol has kept spreading — teen numbers specifically are still moving the direction adults’ aren’t.

More kids feeling like they matter locally. New Hampshire’s survey found 60% of teens now say they feel like they matter to people in their community, up from 2023. Feeling connected to something smaller than “the world” — a school, a team, a neighborhood — turns out to move the needle on hopelessness more than almost anything else measured.

None of these four explanations is dramatic on its own. Together, over four years, they add up to a real shift in the numbers. That’s usually how recovery actually works — not one fix, several small ones compounding.

What this looks like on a Tuesday

Picture a sophomore in 2021, stuck home for remote learning, phone the only door to her friends, the news cycle one long emergency. Now picture her little sister, a sophomore in 2025, back in a full building with clubs running again, a school counselor she can actually get an appointment with, and a vape she never picked up because half her friend group didn’t either.

Same school district. Same family. Genuinely different mental health baseline, four years apart. That’s not a statistic to her. That’s just what being fifteen feels like now, compared to what it felt like then. The screen time numbers haven’t dropped as fast as everything else — three in four New Hampshire teens still report three-plus hours a day on a device — so the recovery isn’t total. But the floor moved, and it moved in the right direction.

If you were a freshman or sophomore during 2020 and 2021, some of what you lived through left a mark that a survey trendline doesn’t erase for you personally. That’s real, and it’s allowed to still be real even while the state-level numbers improve. Progress for a generation and healing for one specific kid don’t move on the same calendar.

What to do with this if you’re a parent or a teen

If you’re a parent, ask your school what’s actually changed since 2021 — counselor staffing, mental health curriculum, club participation. The states that improved most did it with specific, funded programs, not vague encouragement. Your high school section has more on what independence and pressure actually look like at this age.
If you’re a teen reading this, figure out which group you’re actually in — the average or the outlier. The disparities section above isn’t small print — if you’re LGBTQ+, struggling academically, or managing a disability, the national good news doesn’t automatically apply to your specific year, and that’s worth telling an adult you trust instead of assuming you should already feel fine.
Don’t let a good headline replace a real conversation. A survey showing improvement is not the same as a kid actually being okay — ask directly, and ask more than once.
If substance use dropped in your state, don’t assume it dropped in your friend group. State averages hide a lot of variation between one school and the next.

The takeaway

For four straight years, every mental health number about your generation moved one direction, and it wasn’t up. Four states just showed that direction can reverse — genuinely, measurably, in the same year, without a single dramatic fix. That doesn’t mean the work is finished, and it doesn’t mean every kid is fine. It means the floor is no longer only falling. That’s worth more than most headlines will give it credit for.