Depression is becoming more common among adults and adolescents in the United States, but most are not getting therapy to help, according to a new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More than 1 in 8 people ages 12 and up in the US have been depressed in recent years, according to data published Wednesday by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. Depression prevalence has nearly doubled, from 7.3% in 2015-16 to more than 13% in 2021-23.

The findings are based on results from a federal survey – most recently conducted between August 2021 and August 2023 – in which participants reported whether they had had certain symptoms associated with depression in the previous two weeks. Responses to these validated screening questions were scored to determine whether the individuals had depression.

The Covid-19 pandemic interrupted the administration of the survey, and modifications that were made once it resumed – including changes to the way it was administered – may have affected the ability to most accurately track changes over time.

People are less likely to report conditions that could potentially be considered socially undesirable in face-to-face interviews than they are in phone or online interviews, and changes in that method could account for increases, Dr. Renee Goodwin, a psychiatric epidemiologist and clinical psychologist with Columbia University, told CNN.

Still, experts have long said that the pandemic exacerbated mental health challenges for many in the US – 90% of adults have said that the country is facing a mental health crisis, according to a 2022 survey from CNN in partnership with KFF – but experts have also said that awareness around mental health has grown.

Dr. Matt Mishkind, deputy director of the Johnson Depression Center at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, says that researchers have been trying to figure out why depression rates have been growing for the past decade or so – and at least part of it has to do with decreasing stigma around talking about mental health in some groups.

“The question then is, has that truly increased, or have we just been able to identify it more? I definitely think it has increased, and I think that’s because I think the world is a difficult place right now,” he said. “I think there’s been stressor after stressor after stressor for a long time now, and I think that is starting to truly affect people.”

According to the new CDC data, women are more likely than men to have depression, and prevalence tends to decrease with age and greater wealth.

Overall, about 16% of women and 10% of men had depression during the 2021-23 survey period. But more than 1 in 4 adolescent girls between ages 12 and 19 had depression, the data shows, higher than any other demographic group.

Data from the CDC’s latest Youth Risk Behavior Survey showed that more than half of high school girls (53%) said they felt persistently sad or hopeless – nearly twice the rate of share of boys (28%) who said the same and 14 percentage points higher than a decade earlier.

“Girls are more verbal and vocal about some of their challenges, traditionally; boys are not as much, although I think that is changing,” Dr. Jill Emanuele, vice president of clinical training at the Child Mind Institute in New York City, told CNN in August. She was not involved in any of the CDC reports.

Treatment disparities

The vast majority of adults and adolescents with depression in the latest survey – nearly 88% – said that symptoms had created difficulties for them in work, at home or with social activities, and about a third of those said it was “very to extremely difficult.”

But only about 40% of adults and adolescents with depression received counseling or therapy, the new CDC report shows. Women were more likely than men to have received therapy: about 43%, compared with 33%.

Adult women are also more than twice as likely as adult men to take medication for depression, according to another CDC report published Wednesday. In 2023, about 11.4% of US adults took a prescription medication for depression – but that breaks out to more than 15% of women and 7.4% of men.

Despite higher rates of depression in younger age groups, the new CDC reports show that middle-age people were more likely than younger adults to take prescription medication for depression. More than 12% of adults between ages 45 and 74 did so in 2023, compared with less than 11% of adults ages 18 to 44.

US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has specifically targeted a certain class of antidepressant drugs in recent comments. At his Senate confirmation this year, he falsely suggested that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, may be more addictive than heroin.

And the Trump administration’s strategy for the Make America Healthy Again commission – which Kennedy will lead – specifically plans to address an assessment of the “prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors” for children, along with other mental health medications.

But in February, health care data and analytics company Truveta analyzed information from its database of millions of electronic health records to understand whether increased awareness around mental health has led to increases in people seeking medication or concerns around overprescribing or dependency on antidepressant medications.

It found that trends in prescriptions for mental health have remained relatively stable since 2018. Rates ticked up in the early years of the Covid-19 pandemic but have since dropped to levels from 2018 or lower.

Antidepressants are the most commonly prescribed mental health medication – with SSRIs accounting for nearly half – but Truveta found trends in prescribing rates to be much steadier than the CDC found in trends for depression prevalence. And the findings do not suggest that overprescribing mental health medications should be a concern.

“While increased mental health awareness and the heightened demand for care during the COVID-19 pandemic may have contributed to shifts in prescribing rates, our findings suggest that overall trends in mental health prescriptions have remained relatively stable, with only slight fluctuations in recent years,” Truveta researchers wrote in a blog post.

“While there was a slight increase in the rate of mental health prescriptions during the peak years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the subsequent stabilization and decrease suggests that the rise was likely a temporary response to heightened mental health needs rather than a long-term shift toward higher prescribing rates.”