Boys and girls are suffering, but in different ways

Earlier this year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a blockbuster report: Teenage girls in the United States are experiencing record-high levels of despair, with almost two-thirds reporting that they felt persistently sad or hopeless, typical signs of depression. By contrast, almost one-third of teenage boys reported those struggles.

That gap caught our attention. Why is it so large? Are boys able to cope with the challenges of adolescence in ways that girls somehow are not? We wanted to find out. Our social sciences writer Sujata Gupta dug into the data. The truth, she found out, is much more complicated.