Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System

Now, here's your statistics.

According to the CDC's 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, about 20% of high school students seriously considered attempting suicide during the previous year, and about 9.5% reported that they had attempted suicide.

The same survey found that about 19% of high school students have been bullied on school property.

Now, I want to be very clear about something because this matters.

Teenagers.

Based on the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 11% of high school students experienced sexual violence by anyone during the previous 12 months.

17% of female students, roughly one in six, have experienced it.

In high school, 6% of male students, 20% of LGBTQ plus students.

I was just poking around, uh, the Coalition for Healthy Massachusetts website, um, and, and I found, uh, something that was striking to me.

It said that there had been a fourfold increase, uh, in teen use in Massachusetts, which cuts really against the CDC data, uh, the Youth Behavior Risk Survey that comes out, um, every two years, which showed that, uh, you know, ca- teen, teen cannabis use in Massachusetts has actually been halved, uh, you know, in the past nine years.

Um, and so, you know, I, I, I wrote the story basically saying, like, "Look, like this is how they use, uh, what I would call borderline misinformation, uh, to mislead voters to do something and to repeal the will of the people." Um, you know, I was struck poking around the website, and this is sort of my high-minded ideal of democracy that, um, this is really misleading information, and it comes from SAM Action, which is a 501[c][4] which doesn't have to disclose its donors, right? And so this is an out-of-state campaign taking a kernel of truth and spinning it, uh, in a way that greatly misleads voters, that people who aren't engaged on the issues wouldn't know.

And they're well-funded.

Thankfully, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected this effort on Monday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released their Youth Risk Survey.

The study found that students from ninth to twelfth grade are less likely to identify as homosexual or bisexual than they were just two years ago.

Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, said, quote, "That really does look like a free fall.

Twenge? Twenge? I don't know how to pronounce that twinge.

And this is from the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System.

And younger teenagers are not identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual as much as they used to.

And it shows this sharp decline in this sexual identification from the years 2020 through 2023 compared to now.

American teenagers appear to be doing better on several health measures.

The CDC's latest Youth Risk Behavior Survey compared 2025 with 2023.

More high school students reported eating fruits and vegetables every day.

More are drinking water instead of soda.

It's coming from, guess what? The federal government.

So the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's latest Youth Risk Behavior Survey shows that just 12.9% of U.S. high school students reported using marijuana within the previous 30 days.

Yes.

And this, everyone, translates into an all-time low.