The clinical psychologist Lisa Damour published her latest best-selling book, “ [The Emotional Lives of Teenagers](https://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Lives-Teenagers-Compassionate-Adolescents/dp/0593500016),” in February, a week after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an alarming report on the mental health of adolescents. In the C.D.C.’s [survey](https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/fact-sheets/healthy-youth/sadness-and-violence-among-teen-girls-and-LGBQ-youth-factsheet.html), three in five teen-age girls reported having felt “persistently sad and hopeless” in the past year, thirty per cent reported that they had seriously considered suicide, and thirteen per cent said that they had attempted suicide. All of these marked significant increases over previous years, and girls also reported increased exposure to sexual violence. Among L.G.B.T.Q.+ kids, the numbers were even worse: two-thirds reported feeling persistent sadness, forty-five per cent had thoughts of suicide, and twenty-two per cent had attempted suicide. Hypotheses about the causes of this apparent mental-health calamity centered on the overuse of social media, the lingering psychological damage wrought by the , and, for queer kids, an increasingly malignant political climate.