Are smartphones harming schoolchildren’s mental health? Here’s what the science says

Is something going wrong for Irish teenagers? While most children and adolescents are mentally well and resilient, there are mounting warning signs about rising anxiety and depression rates.

Ireland’s most comprehensive study of young people’s mental health and wellbeing is the My World study, developed by UCD’s school of psychology and mental health charity Jigsaw, based on the responses of more than 19,000 young people between 2012 and 2019.

It found that levels of anxiety and depression rose among 12- to 19-year-olds between 2012 and 2019, while levels of self-esteem, resilience and optimism fell.

For example, the proportion of adolescents who fell into the severe and very severe categories for depression almost doubled (from 8 to 16 per cent), while the same was true of the proportion of adolescents who fell into the severe and very severe categories for anxiety (11 to 22 per cent). These problems surged during the pandemic, more recent studies suggest, but that’s another matter.

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A similar trend is visible across the water. The share of British teens who do not consider themselves likable more than doubled since 2010, while the share who think of themselves as a failure and who worry a lot rose sharply. In the US, similarly, the number of high school students who say their life often feels meaningless has jumped dramatically in the past 12 years.

Wherever you look, there are red flags everywhere: young mental health is under strain. So, what’s to blame?

Many point to an inflection point at about the 2010 mark, give or take a few years, when smartphones started to become much more widely available.

Among the leading proponents of the theory that having always-on access to social media is harming children’s mental health is Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University and her regular co-author Jonathan Haidt.

Prof Twenge has pointed to a change in the way teens spend their time outside school starting from the early 2010s which coincides with a downward slide in mental health and increased suicidal ideation and self-harm among young people. She argues that increased access to social media began to displace in-person gatherings, drive social comparison and body image issues, disrupt sleep patterns and prompt more cases of cyberbullying.

[ Are young people becoming addicted to social media and the internet? Here’s what the research has found ]

Many studies also show that the more time teens spend on social media, the worse their mental health is. The gradient tends to be steepest for girls, who also spend much more time on social media than boys.

A similar pattern is evident in the My World study on youth mental health in Ireland. It found a “significant relationship” between time spent online (more than three hours) and higher levels of depression, anxiety and lower levels of body esteem, among teenage girls especially.

The United States surgeon general, Dr Vivek Murthy, also warned earlier this year that the effects of social media on adolescent mental health were not fully understood and that social media could be beneficial to some users. Nonetheless, he wrote: “There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and wellbeing of children and adolescents.”

So far, so worrying.

[ Minister discourages people from buying smartphones for children this Christmas ]

However, some academics say that while these findings point to a correlation between a decline in teen mental health and increased social media use, they do not point to a causal link.

Reviews of the studies on social media use and adolescents’ mental health show most find the links to be “weak” and “inconclusive” or “weighed down by a lack of quality” and “conflicting evidence.”

Finding correlations in data when it comes to the link between adolescent wellbeing and digital technology can have more to do with how researchers’ biases influence data analysis, as opposed to whether there’s an actual signal in the data.

Other academics caution that mental health issues are complex and nuanced and rarely explained by one simple factor.

Alongside the rise in social media use, various other possible factors cited in research literature when it comes to a decline in teen mental health include a reduction in stigma around mental ill health; greater awareness about anxiety and depression; changes in diagnostic criteria for mental health issues; financial difficulties; and more.

Some academics also suggest there is a reason some young people flourish online while others struggle.

Teenagers with certain vulnerabilities – such as low self-esteem, poor body image or social struggles – seem to be most at risk. Others indicate that teenagers’ online and offline social networks are similar. They use social media mainly to navigate their existing relationships, not to forge new ones.

[ ‘There is definitely more anxiety in teenage girls’: Meeting the mental health challenge in school ]

This is echoed in the My World study in Ireland. As well as the negative findings above, it also found many adolescents and young adults were using social media to build on and extend their social connections in real life. In other words, social media may hurt, as well as help, mental health.

The reality is that research is still in its early years. Are smartphones the root cause of mental health issues or do they accentuate pre-existing issues among young people?

It’s too early to say for sure – but there is enough to suggest for now that this is an area that is far more nuanced than some headlines suggest.

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