Teens used to be happier. What changed?

Even post-COVID, few teens say they are “very happy”

One of the challenges of doing research on trends in mental health is finding survey data that goes back decades. The National Survey of Drug Use and Health, which measures clinical-level depression in a large sample, only has data back to the mid-2000s. Monitoring the Future (MtF) and the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) both have data on depressive symptoms, but only back to 1991.

There are some ways around this, many of which I explored early in my career before these datasets were available. For example, I found that children’s and college students’ anxiety levels increased between the 1950s and the early 1990s by doing a cross-temporal meta-analysis (finding research articles that reported average scores on the same measure and seeing if those scores had changed over time). Other researchers also reported increases in depression rates among adolescents over this time.

Between the early 1990s and about 2010, though, teen mental health mostly improved — or at least didn’t get any worse. The teen suicide rate went down. In YRBSS, the number of teens saying they seriously thought about suicide declined between the 1990s and 2009 (this is Figure 5.68 in the Millennials chapter of Generations). In MtF, depressive symptoms went down slightly. So we have a clear picture of the decline or stability in teen depression from the early 1990s to 2010 and the huge rise after 2010-12, but there is no survey I know of that has tracked teen depression from the pre-1990s era to the present.

But we do have data going back further for one key indicator of psychological well-being: Happiness. Happiness has been measured in exactly the same way among high school seniors (17- and 18-year-olds) since 1976 in Monitoring the Future. The happiness item (“Taking all things together, how would you say things are these days – would you say you’re very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy these days?”) thus gives us the longest-running view of any indicator of psychological well-being among adolescents. (Happiness has also been measured this way among 8^th and 10^th graders since 1991.) So how has teen happiness changed over the course of six decades?