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One in three U.S. high school students still reported persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2025. That is lower than the 42 percent peak in 2021 and the 40 percent reading in 2023. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, released as Youth Health in Focus, is the first stretch of consecutive improvement in those measures since the pandemic emergency. Serious consideration of suicide fell from 22 percent in 2021 to 14 percent in 2025. Plans fell from 18 percent to 12 percent. Attempts fell from 10 percent to 6 percent. The survey is self-report, not a clinic census. It does not prove what caused the turn.
What Moved in Two Years
From 2023 to 2025, five mental-health indicators improved. Poor mental health dropped from 29 percent to 23 percent. Daily fruit consumption rose from 33 percent to 39 percent. Daily vegetables rose from 58 percent to 63 percent. Students drinking plain water at least three times a day rose from 54 percent to 58 percent. Sports-team participation rose from 52 percent to 58 percent.
Sleep did not. About 24 percent of students got eight or more hours on a school night, essentially unchanged from 23 percent in 2023. Daily physical education attendance fell. Hourly social-media use stayed common: roughly one in three students. The body of the report is diet, movement, sleep, screens, and distress — the same stack Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again agenda has treated as the base layer under mood.
CDC chief medical officer Jennifer Shuford called the two-year shifts “meaningful” and said they show progress when schools, families, and communities support young people. She also said too many students still fail daily health behaviors that affect long-term health.
The Decade Still Shows the Wound
From 2015 to 2025, persistent sadness rose from 30 percent to 33 percent. The CDC classifies that ten-year line as worsened even as the last two cycles improved. Suicide consideration was 18 percent in 2015, 22 percent in 2021, and 14 percent in 2025; the agency still tags the decade trend as unchanged on that item. Emergency-department visits for adolescent mental-health concerns jumped 31 percent during the pandemic peak versus 2019. The new numbers are a retreat from that peak, not a return to the mid-2010s.
Girls remain the heavier load. In 2025, 43 percent of female students reported persistent sadness against 24 percent of males. Poor mental health: 31 percent versus 16 percent. Serious suicide consideration: 18 percent versus 11 percent. Ninth graders were more likely than older students to make a plan or attempt. Those gaps survived the overall decline.
Habits Moved With Mood. Causation Did Not Arrive in the Tables.
Students who eat plants, drink water, and play on a team are the same cohort showing lower hopelessness. That is a correlation the survey can show. It cannot assign credit to a single policy, a single food, or a single hour off a phone. Ultra-processed diets, sitting, and late screens remain the mechanical suspects MAHA has named. The YRBS does not isolate them.
The useful reading is narrower. Distress is no longer only climbing. Food and team sport markers climbed in the same window. Sleep and PE did not. A third of students still describe weeks of sadness. Forty-three percent of girls do. Prevention that treats movement, meals, and darkness as first-line tools is now the frame the CDC put on the cover. The tables still say the crisis is smaller than 2021 and larger than 2015.
