The CDC's 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, released September 21, showed broad improvement in high school mental health indicators. The share of students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness fell from 40% in 2023 to 33% in 2025. For district leaders, the useful question is not whether to celebrate. It is what a one-in-three national figure tells you about your own students, and what it leaves out.
What the 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found
The YRBS is CDC's nationally representative survey of U.S. high school students and has run for more than 35 years. Between 2023 and 2025, CDC reports two core mental health indicators moved in the right direction:
- Persistent sadness or hopelessness: 40% → 33%
- Poor mental health: 29% → 23%
Those are meaningful shifts over a two-year window. They are also still high. A school of 1,200 students sitting at the national average would have roughly 400 students reporting persistent sadness or hopelessness in the past year.
The average hides the gap
The national figure blends two very different experiences. In 2025, 43% of female students reported persistent sadness or hopelessness, compared with 24% of male students. On poor mental health, the split was 31% versus 16%. CDC notes that female students were more likely than male students to report every mental health indicator it measured.
For planning purposes, that matters more than the headline. A district whose Tier 2 groups, counseling caseloads, or outreach materials are built around the "average" student is likely under-serving the group carrying nearly twice the load.
What the 2025 report no longer tells you
The 2025 national release is organized around five focus areas: dietary behaviors, physical activity, sleep, digital behaviors, and mental health. Earlier national summaries, including the 2013–2023 Data Summary & Trends Report, also reported on substance use, violence, and other risk areas that school teams have long used to frame their needs assessments.
That narrower scope has a practical consequence. If your district's annual mental health plan has leaned on the national YRBS as its outside benchmark for substance use or school safety, that benchmark is thinner this cycle. State and local YRBS administrations, district climate surveys, and universal screening data become more important, not less.
School connectedness is still the lever schools control
The most actionable finding for schools came in the previous cycle and has not changed. CDC's analysis of 2023 YRBS data found that students with high school connectedness, measured by agreement with "you feel close to people at your school," had a lower prevalence of every mental health indicator studied. The association held after adjusting for other factors. The same analysis found that female, Black, Hispanic, and LGBQ+ students reported lower connectedness than their peers.
This is an association, not proof that connectedness programs cause improvement. But it identifies the one protective factor that sits squarely inside a school's control, and it is the natural home for Tier 1 work in a Multi-Tiered System of Supports: school-wide climate, adult-student relationships, and classroom practices that make students feel known.
What this means for district and school leaders
Three practical steps follow from the 2025 data.
Use the improvement to protect investment, not reduce it. A drop from 40% to 33% still leaves one in three students reporting persistent sadness. Improvement is a reason to sustain campus mental health infrastructure, not to reallocate it.
Disaggregate your own data before you plan. The national gender gap is large enough that any district reviewing climate survey or screening results should break them out by sex, grade, and other subgroups before setting priorities for the year.
Benchmark your system, not just your students. Student outcome data tells you where need is. It does not tell you whether your school mental health system is built to meet it. The School Mental Health Quality Assessment from the National Center for School Mental Health, available at no cost through the SHAPE System, scores a district across seven quality domains, from teaming to funding and sustainability. Many districts have never completed one. Pairing this fall's local data with an SMH-QA gives a leadership team both halves of the picture.
Looking ahead
National indicators are moving the right way, and the work of keeping them there happens close to students. School-Based Healthcare Solutions Network, Inc. (SBHSN), a private grant-making organization focused on access to mental health care on school campuses, publishes this weekly review to help school leaders turn national data into local decisions. Schools and districts weighing campus-based mental health capacity can review the grant solicitation and its published criteria at sbhsnetwork.com/grants. Application deadlines fall on the first Monday of July, September, November, and February; questions can be sent to grants@sbhsnetwork.com.
Sources
- CDC Data Show Encouraging Progress in Youth Health — Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed 2026-09-30
- Youth Health in Focus: Mental health indicators, 2025 — Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed 2026-09-30
- Mental Health and Protective Factors Among High School Students, YRBS 2023 — CDC, MMWR Supplements, accessed 2026-09-30
- Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report: 2013–2023 — CDC Stacks, accessed 2026-09-30
- School Mental Health Quality Assessment (SHAPE System) — National Center for School Mental Health, accessed 2026-09-30
Transitional Coach℠ and Coaching Model℠ are service marks of School-Based Healthcare Solutions Network, Inc. © 2026 School-Based Healthcare Solutions Network, Inc. All rights reserved. This article is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute clinical, legal, or financial advice.