Almost half of Gen Z, 47% of those aged 12 to 26, report feeling anxious often or always, and roughly 22% say they feel depressed on a regular basis, according to widely cited industry surveys summarized in recent news coverage. Researchers studying long-running adolescent datasets have been finding the same shape in the academic numbers. Depressive symptoms among US teens climbed sharply between the early 2010s and 2018, a pattern Keyes and colleagues documented across nationally representative data going back to 1991.1
The story is not that young people invented unhappiness. It is that the curve bent, and it bent fast. A 2019 analysis of mood disorder indicators and suicide-related outcomes by Twenge and colleagues found increases concentrated in adolescents and young adults rather than older cohorts, which is part of why the term “Gen Z mental health crisis” stuck.2
What the survey numbers actually say
The viral statistics circulating online tend to come from a handful of sources. Gallup’s 2023 reporting on Gen Z found that only about 15% of Gen Zers rated their mental health as excellent, a striking drop from older generations at comparable ages. Deloitte’s annual Gen Z and Millennial Survey has consistently reported elevated anxiety and stress, and recurring industry trackers put roughly 65% of Gen Zers as having experienced at least one mental health problem in the past two years, compared to 51% of millennials and 29% of Gen X. Those are self-report figures, and they are not the same thing as a clinical diagnosis. Still, when the same direction shows up across surveys with different methods and different question wording, that is a signal worth taking seriously.
The peer-reviewed literature backs up the direction. Askari and colleagues, in a 2024 integrative review of birth cohort and time period trends in adolescent depression in the United States, concluded that depression among US adolescents rose meaningfully from the early 2010s onward, with the increase showing up in multiple datasets and across age, period, and cohort analyses.4 Kaur and colleagues, working with Monitoring the Future data from 1991 to 2019, found that internalizing symptoms (the family of feelings that includes sadness, worthlessness, and anxiety) rose particularly among more recent birth cohorts.3
So the headline number, “47% of Gen Z feel anxious often or always,” is a survey statistic, not a diagnostic rate. But the underlying current is real, and academic researchers have been tracking it for years.
Young women have taken the heaviest hit
One of the most consistent findings, across very different methodologies, is that young women have seen the steeper decline. CDC data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey have shown that reports of persistent sadness or hopelessness among high school girls have nearly doubled since the early 1990s, and in the most recent surveys roughly three in five teen girls reported persistent sadness or hopelessness in the past year. Twenge and colleagues’ analysis of mood disorder indicators between 2005 and 2017 found that increases in major depressive episodes were larger among adolescents than among older adults, and larger among young women than young men.2
That gender gap is not new. It shows up in adult populations too. What is new is the scale, and how early it begins. Kaur and colleagues’ 2024 follow-up analysis of internalizing symptoms among racialized and minoritized adolescents found that increases were widely shared across groups, with girls consistently showing higher symptom levels than boys.
Why women specifically? No one has a single tidy answer. The candidate explanations include differences in how girls use social media (more comparison-heavy, more relational), earlier puberty timing, sleep loss, and longstanding gender differences in how distress gets reported and recognized. Honest answer: it is probably several of these acting together, and the research community is still arguing about the weights.
Has the curve started to flatten?
This is the part of the story that gets less coverage. The most recent CDC data, released in 2024, show signs of stabilization. Persistent sadness or hopelessness among US high school students dipped slightly, from 42% to 40%, and a few subgroup indicators improved modestly. That is not a recovery. It is a pause. But it does undermine the simplest version of the doom narrative, the one that says things are getting worse forever.
Askari and colleagues, in their 2024 review, were careful about this. They noted that the strongest evidence for a sharp rise covers roughly 2012 to the late 2010s, and that more recent data are mixed.4 A Blanchflower group paper in 2025 examining international wellbeing data found that the youngest age groups were now reporting lower wellbeing than middle-aged adults across many countries, the so-called disappearing midlife dip.5 So the international picture is still pointing down for young people in many places, even as some US adolescent indicators are stabilizing. Both can be true at once.
What is driving it? Three honest answers
If you read enough of this literature, you notice researchers using language that is careful in a particular way. They will say “consistent with” and “compatible with” and “may contribute to,” because the data are correlational and the candidate causes are tangled up with each other. That said, three drivers come up repeatedly.
The first is digital environments. The smartphone became near-universal in US adolescence between roughly 2010 and 2015, and that timeline matches the steepest part of the rise in depressive symptoms remarkably well. Researchers disagree about how strong the effect is. Some find moderate associations between heavy social media use and lower wellbeing, especially in girls. Others find small effects that could plausibly be noise. The honest summary is that the evidence supports a real but probably modest effect, with bigger effects for some kinds of use (passive scrolling, late-night use, image-based comparison) than for others.
The second is sleep. Adolescents are sleeping less, on average, than they did two decades ago, and Kaur and colleagues found that the share of US students reporting at least seven hours of sleep dropped over the same window in which internalizing symptoms rose.3 Their analysis suggested that some of the rise in symptoms tracked the decline in sleep. Sleep is not the only thing going on, but it is one of the few mechanisms with a plausible biological pathway and a clear behavioral handle, which is part of why clinicians keep returning to it.
The third is what researchers sometimes call the broader “stressor environment.” School pressure, climate anxiety, political polarization, post-pandemic disruption, and economic uncertainty are all named in the qualitative literature when young people are asked what is weighing on them. None of these is a clean experimental variable, and you cannot run a randomized trial on whether a generation feels safe in the world. But it would be strange if growing up through 2020 and 2021 left no mark.
What the numbers do not capture
Surveys ask people to rate themselves. That sounds simple, and it is not. Self-report is shaped by what is socially acceptable to say. One uncomfortable possibility, raised in the academic literature, is that part of the apparent rise reflects not more distress but more willingness to label distress. A teenager in 1995 who said “I feel kind of off” might today say “my anxiety is bad this week.” The vocabulary expanded.
Askari and colleagues review this carefully and conclude that destigmatization can explain some of the trend, but probably not most of it.4 Independent indicators, including emergency department visits for self-harm and adolescent suicide rates, have moved in directions that are hard to explain by language change alone. So labeling matters, but real distress matters more. Both lenses belong in the picture.
How to read this if you are Gen Z, or you love someone who is
A few things are worth saying clearly, because they are easy to miss in the statistics.
If you feel anxious or low for long stretches, you are not an outlier in your generation, and you are not broken. The numbers say that a large share of your peers are dealing with something similar. That fact does not make your experience less real, but it should make it less lonely.
Statistics are descriptions, not predictions. A survey saying that 47% of Gen Z feel often anxious does not say anything about how next month, or next year, will go for any specific person. Trends shift. Your nervous system is not fixed at 17.
The interventions with the most consistent evidence remain unglamorous: regular sleep, daylight, physical movement, in-person time with people who like you, fewer hours of passive scrolling, professional help when symptoms last more than a couple of weeks or interfere with daily life. None of those is a magic fix, and pretending otherwise is part of what the wellness industry got wrong. They are, in aggregate, the levers that move.
Common questions about Gen Z mental health
Is Gen Z really more anxious than previous generations were at the same age?
Multiple peer-reviewed analyses, including those by Twenge and Keyes, find that depressive symptoms and self-reported anxiety among US adolescents and young adults rose meaningfully between roughly 2010 and 2019, and that the rise is steeper for younger cohorts than for older ones at the same chronological age.1,2 So yes, on the available data, more recent cohorts of young people report higher symptom levels than their predecessors did at comparable ages.
Is social media to blame?
The honest answer is that social media appears to contribute, especially for heavy users and for adolescent girls, but it is not the whole story. The timing fits, the candidate mechanisms (sleep loss, social comparison, displacement of in-person time) are plausible, and several studies find associations. The size of the effect remains contested.
Are things still getting worse?
Recent CDC data show modest signs of stabilization in some US indicators, including a slight decline in persistent sadness or hopelessness among high school students. Internationally, Blanchflower and colleagues find that young people are now reporting lower wellbeing than middle-aged adults in many countries, which is historically unusual.5 The picture is mixed.
What helps, individually?
Sleep, daylight exposure, regular movement, in-person social contact, limiting passive late-night scrolling, and seeking professional help when distress persists. None of these are silver bullets, and people whose symptoms are severe or long-lasting should not try to manage alone.
Should I be worried about a friend who seems okay but spends a lot of time online?
Worry is the wrong frame. Curiosity is better. Ask. Real questions, in person, without phones on the table. People who are struggling rarely volunteer it cold, but they often answer when someone they trust asks plainly.
Where this leaves us
The numbers are sobering, and they are also a snapshot. Almost half of Gen Z report frequent anxiety, young women have been hit harder than young men, and several large peer-reviewed analyses confirm that the academic curve points the same way the survey curve does. At the same time, the most recent CDC data hint that some indicators are flattening, and the international story remains uneven. Researchers are still arguing about how much of the rise is digital, how much is sleep, how much is the broader stressor environment, and how much is the simple fact that we now have better language for naming distress.
None of that resolves what an individual person should do tonight. If this is your story, the small interventions still matter. If this is the story of someone you love, the most useful thing you can offer is probably not a statistic. It is your time, your attention, and the kind of unhurried question that lets a person say the thing they have been trying not to say.
Sources
- Keyes KM et al. Recent increases in depressive symptoms among US adolescents: trends from 1991 to 2018. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. 2019. PubMed: 30929042
- Twenge JM et al. Age, period, and cohort trends in mood disorder indicators and suicide-related outcomes in a nationally representative dataset, 2005-2017. Journal of Abnormal Psychology. 2019. PubMed: 30869927
- Kaur N et al. Age, Period, and Cohort Effects of Internalizing Symptoms Among US Students and the Influence of Self-Reported Frequency of Attaining 7 or More Hours of Sleep: Results From the Monitoring the Future Survey 1991-2019. American Journal of Epidemiology. 2022. PubMed: 35048117
- Askari MS et al. An integrative literature review of birth cohort and time period trends in adolescent depression in the United States. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. 2024. PubMed: 37428192
- Blanchflower DG et al. The declining mental health of the young and the global disappearance of the unhappiness hump shape in age. PLoS One. 2025. PubMed: 40864616
