‘Jarring’ decline in N.H. girls’ mental health, per new report

The report, released Tuesday by the New Hampshire Women’s Foundation, found 58 percent of girls experienced depression and 32 percent considered suicide, a “sharp uptick” compared to prior years.

The report also found that social media use could have a negative impact on girls’ body image, which was in turn linked with lowered self-esteem and eating disorders.DisobeyArt/Adobe

CONCORD, N.H. — There was a sharp uptick in depression and suicide consideration among girls in New Hampshire following the pandemic, according to a report released Tuesday by the New Hampshire Women’s Foundation.

The report found that 58 percent of girls surveyed experienced depression in 2021, the most recent year for which data was available ahead of the report’s publication — a jump of 14 percentage points over 2019. And one in three girls considered suicide in 2021, up from about one in five in 2019.

“One of the most jarring updates is the decline of mental health among all youth,” said Devan Quinn, policy director at the New Hampshire Women’s Foundation and one of the report’s authors.

“Girls, however, are twice as likely as boys to experience poor mental health, depression, self harm and suicide consideration,” she said.

She noted that rates of depression among girls in New Hampshire are above the national average of 41 percent, and it’s the highest rate among states in New England.

Quinn said there are likely many factors driving the troubling increase. Among them were the isolating effect of the COVID-19 pandemic when school mental health supports weren’t available and the impact of social media. Quinn said cyberbullying is another issue girls face while online or on their phones.

The report also found that social media use could have a negative impact on girls’ body image, which was in turn linked with lowered self-esteem and eating disorders. Those issues impacted a higher percentage of girls than boys.

Just last week, the US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times that social media should come with a warning label about possible health risks, similar to labels for tobacco products. He said social media has contributed to the mental health crisis among young people.

Kristin Smith, a visiting research associate professor of sociology at Dartmouth College said the “sharp uptick” of these mental health issues is striking.

“The rates are even higher for gay, lesbian or bisexual girls,” said Smith. “These levels are unprecedented and indicate a need for ‘all hands on deck.’”

The latest report — which is released every two years — is the first to capture the impact of the pandemic on the state’s 124,000 girls, who make up about 9 percent of the total population.

The survey included students from ninth through 12th grade, and 6,312 girls responded to the question about suicide. There were 6,515 girls who responded to the question about depression.

The data on suicidality and depression comes from the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey. They show a longer-term trend of increasing rates of depression among girls since 2011, when 31 percent of girls experienced depression. That’s nearly doubled over the past decade.

The report also found that the poverty rate for New Hampshire girls was the lowest in the country at 7 percent. And the state also had the lowest teen birth rate in the nation at 4.58 births per 1,000 teen girls, a rate that has been consistently trending down.