“An adolescent’s world can be bleak,” said an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week. The agency just released the results of its National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which revealed an increase in teens reporting “feelings of sadness or hopelessness.” The report found that “during the 12 months before the survey, 31.5% of students nationwide had felt so sad or hopeless almost every day for 2 or more weeks in a row that they stopped doing some usual activities.”

Overall, the numbers portray a teenage populace that — while less likely than a decade ago to binge drink, for example — is increasingly discouraged.

To cope with the problem, the CDC urges intervention by schools and health-care providers. But we also shouldn’t neglect to ask bigger questions about how to actually make life better for teenagers. And while there’s no doubt that acute interventions by schools, service providers and caretakers can be crucial in many cases, making life better for teens requires thinking about how we arrange society as a whole — and how we might rearrange it.