![]() Most studies on these topics just look at a snapshot: thousands of people answer a questionnaire, which asks them questions about their social media use and their mental health: how satisfied are you with your life, with your appearance, and so on. You ask a seemingly simple question: ‘there’s this technology out there, how’s it affecting our mental health?’ But it’s all a big mess.”Īnd it’s very hard to show what is causing what. “If you look at 100 different papers in the area,” says Etchells, “you’ll find people talking about 100 different things.” For scientists in the field, he says, it’s “panic-inducing” to realise “the vast scope of what we’re trying to do. Are we talking about “psychological wellbeing”, which is something like how happy or sad you are feeling, or how satisfied with your life, as reported on a questionnaire? Or are we talking about diagnoses of clinical mental health disorders, like depression and anxiety? Those are very different things, and are measured differently. More than that, mental health isn’t a simple thing, either. Me doomscrolling through Twitter is not the same as a teenager making TikTok memes or a 65-year-old posting in a neighbourhood Facebook group. It would include Skyping family members, or playing Mario Kart with friends over the internet, or watching Match of the Day, or watching hardcore porn. His point is that “screen time” isn’t a simple thing. ![]() “‘Social media’ and ‘screen time’ are pretty useless terms,” says Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology at Bath Spa University who is writing a book about our relationship with screens and technology. But it also reveals the limitations of the research into screens and mental health, and what we need to do to get better information.īefore we talk about what it found, though, it’s worth explaining why it’s so difficult to do good scientific work in this area in the first place. It found what appears to be a real link between mental health and social media, but it’s a complicated one, and not as dramatic or frightening as some might suggest. It tried to answer some questions that parents and others will have about what effect social media has, if any, on adolescents’ mental health, and looking to see if there are times when young people are especially vulnerable. This week a study came out in the journal Nature Communications. So the field has been left open to speculation and fearmongering. Worries like this are partly behind legislation like the Online Harms Bill, currently working its way through parliament.īut what’s been difficult has been getting good scientific evidence that screen time in general, or social media in particular, are causing these harms. In 2018, the then Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, even compared the risk of social media to the well-established dangers of eating too much sugar. These fears have led to all sorts of reactions, from major articles with headlines like “ Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” to Sunday Times investigations suggesting that social media is behind a rise in teen suicides. That study explicitly links the rise to social media. Social media, in particular, worries parents: whether it’s by creating a new avenue for children to bully each other, or by presenting unrealistic images of happy lives and perfect bodies.Įvery so often, widely publicised studies come out that seem to find worrying trends – studies that, for instance, find that “depression, self-harm, suicide and unhappiness” all increased dramatically in US adolescents, especially girls and young women, after 2012. “Social media”, a catch-all term for everything from WhatsApp DM groups to YouTube, is a central part of modern adolescence.Īnd in recent years, there has been growing concern that screen time is harming young people’s mental health. But it will not be long, in the grand scheme of things, before they are using TikTok or whatever has succeeded it by then to interact with their friends. At least our children are still too young to have seriously started demanding phones of their own. This does not, as I understand it, get easier with time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |