Teens who spend hours on socials developing mental health problems...Depression, anxiety, aggression, and antisocial behavior..
Teens are anxious and depressed after three hours a day on
social media
September 11, 2019
A study published
today in the journal JAMA Psychiatry suggests that teenagers who spend more
than three hours a day on social media are more likely to develop mental health
problems including depression, anxiety, aggression, and antisocial behavior.
The study: Nearly
6,600 12- to 15-year-old Americans self-reported how much time they spent per
day on social media, as well as whether they had any mental health problems.
The researchers found that three hours of social media correlated with higher
rates of mental health issues, even after adjusting for a history of such
problems.
How teens absorb social
media: The effects of social-media consumption on teens manifest
in two main ways, according to the study’s authors: internally (depression and
anxiety, for example) and externally (aggressive behavior or antisocial
behavior). The latter were essentially nonexistent among teens who reported
that they didn’t use social media.
But this is old news ...
right? Researchers have long struggled with understanding how
social media, screen
time, and other forms of personal technology affect child and
adolescent brain development. Much of that is because that technology develops
faster than it can be studied. It also doesn’t help that researchers have come
to conflicting conclusions. For example, this study from
last month at the University of California, Irvine, suggested that there was no
link between tech time and mental health. Social media, however, might be
different: this study published
earlier this year found a worrying link between social-media use and social-media
addiction.
Social media is changing
faster than we know how to understand it. The
information was self-reported, which means the study is a pretty imprecise
tool—the teens in the study might actually use social media more than they say
they do, or their mental health issues might differ in type or severity from
what they reported. But it’s difficult to get an objective look at these kinds
of things, especially as the services people use proliferate. Teens today are
way less likely to use Facebook and more likely to flip through TikTok. They’re
also using social media differently, Snapchatting or Instagram DMing pals
text-message style, which could explain why some teens are on social media so
much in the first place.
Everything in moderation: Kira
Riehm, a PhD student at Johns Hopkins and the lead author of the study,
says the three-hour cutoff shouldn’t be taken as a concrete rule. “I think
this may be more of an artifact of the analyses than a meaningful cutoff,” she
says. “I don’t know if, on its own, this means that much. Future studies could
track, in real time, the amount of time spent on social media use, which would
provide more precision in estimating some sort of cutoff.” It’s the study’s
broader point that Riehm says is worth remembering: excessive time on social
media doesn’t help people’s mental state.
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