Teen Girls’ Suicide Rates Are Rising In Many Countries Around The World
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Teen Girls’ Suicide Rates Are Rising In Many Countries Around The World<br>New analyses from Europe, Japan, and South Korea show increases that in many cases began before COVID.
Jean M. Twenge<br>Jul 02, 2026
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Introduction from Zach Rausch:<br>One of the puzzles we’ve been piecing together here on After Babel is to what extent the youth mental health crisis extends beyond the United States. (We previously published a four-part series on the topic looking at the five major Anglo countries — the Nordic nations , Europe , and beyond . We found that, yes, it does appear to be an international phenomenon.) An important set of metrics in this story (though not the only one) is suicide rates.<br>In today’s cross-post, Jean Twenge, psychologist, author, and our frequent collaborator and contributor to After Babel, digs into the latest international data on suicide trends. She finds that suicide rates have been rising among adolescents, especially girls, in Europe, Japan, and South Korea from the early 2010s into the early 2020s. Her examination of this new data points to the important fact that the youth suicide rates are rising internationally, particularly among girls, and therefore are not well explained by factors unique to the United States.<br>Thank you to Jean for allowing us to share this research directly with our readers. You can find more of Jean’s work over on her Substack, Generation Tech , and through her new book, 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World .<br>– Zach
Photo by Elle Morre on Unsplash<br>Teen Girls’ Suicide Rates Are Rising In Many Countries Around The World
By Jean M. Twenge<br>As countries around the world consider social media bans for kids under 16 , the question has come up again: Is the teen mental health crisis confined to the U.S., or is it international ?<br>There are many reasons to support a social media ban that have nothing to do with mental health. Many parents don’t want their kids using TikTok at 2am, buying drugs or exchanging explicit photos on Snapchat, or comparing themselves to the perfect bodies on Instagram. There are also many reasons to care about the teen mental health crisis apart from the role of social media.
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But understanding the scope of the mental health crisis is useful for knowing where teens are suffering more than in generations past and for determining the cause of the crisis. If school shootings were the primary driver of the teen mental health crisis, for example, we would expect depression, anxiety, and suicide to rise in the U.S. but not in countries without the same level of school violence. The same goes for other U.S.-specific explanations, such as the opioid epidemic .<br>We already have solid data from many sources that anxiety, low life satisfaction , emotional distress , poor mental health , and loneliness have increased among adolescents and/or young adults in many countries around the world.<br>But what about suicide rates? Critics like Chris Ferguson have often argued that suicide data, in particular, do not fit the narrative of an international crisis in youth mental health. Others have made this argument as well. In his review of The Anxious Generation, for example, Tobias Dienlin writes, “the mental health crisis Haidt describes appears to be more specific to certain regions, particularly the United States, rather than a global phenomenon. Data from large-scale international sources show no consistent decline in youth well-being (Marquez et al., 2024) or suicides (Michalek et al., 2024). This discrepancy suggests that the mental health issues Haidt highlights are influenced by regional factors rather than being universally applicable.”<br>As we’ve already covered, youth well-being is indeed down (including in most of the datasets discussed in Marquez et al., 2024, the report Dienlin cites) . And the source Dienlin cites for suicides uses the Global Burden of Disease database, which relies on estimates rather than actual data .<br>What happens if researchers look at actual suicide data, not modeled estimates?<br>Several articles published in the last year have taken a more detailed look at suicide rates in many countries across the globe. These analyses have taken two steps that many previous analyses did not: 1) they gathered actual suicide mortality data instead of using the Global Burden of Disease or WHO Global Estimates and 2) they report suicide rates broken down by gender and age group. This is crucial, since the rise of social media impacted teen girls and young women the most; looking at overall suicide rates isn’t good enough.<br>A caveat: More than other mental health indicators, suicide rates can be influenced by many factors, including access to firearms, the availability of mental health treatment, and suicide prevention programs and helplines . There are also cultural differences and developments unique to certain countries or...