A recent study by researchers at Cornell, Columbia, and University of California- Berkeley links addictive screen use by adolescents to an increase in suicidal behaviors. The study followed 4,285 U.S. adolescents over a four-year period, and the results imply overwhelmingly that the key element driving risk of suicidal behavior is not total time but rather addictive use of social media, mobile phones, and video games.
“This is the first study to identify that addictive use is important, and is actually the root cause, instead of time,” said lead author Yunyu Xiao, assistant professor of psychiatry and population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medical College.
“This study demonstrated that the total amount of time spent on social media, mobile phones and video games was not associated with future suicide-related or mental health outcomes. What mattered most was how youth were engaging with screens—especially whether their use showed signs of compulsion, distress or loss of control.
Study authors wrote that, “repeated assessment of social media and mobile phones in children entering adolescence for addictive use patterns could be valuable.
“Children who initially display low or moderate trajectories are not typically considered at-risk, but follow-up can detect concerning trends such as development of more severe addictive use over time,” said Dr. Xiao, who is also assistant professor of population health sciences in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine.
The Environmental Health Trust notes, there has been a consensus for some time that excessive screen time and high use of social media are major factors in depression, stress, and sleep disruption in children (see the recent White House report), but researchers in this study have dug deeper, finding that children demonstrating highly addictive screen use were two to three times more likely to have thoughts of suicide or to harm themselves.
Solutions in the face of corporate interests may be hard to implement, but in the EU some countries are trying to disrupt the cycle. Last week, the Netherlands issued guidelines recommending that children under the age of 15 not have access to social media. France, Spain, and Greece have all recently pressed for an EU-wide age verification system setting a minimum age of 15 for social media access.
The more proof we see of the dangers of screen addiction, the more we are armed to advocate for the mental health of our children. In the meantime, we can all try adopting some of psychologist Angela Duckworth’s suggestions; in her recent commencement speech at Bates College she asked graduates to hand their phones to someone else while she spoke. And her top recommendations for future success? Putting phones in another room when needing to focus deeply, and consciously improving our sky-to-screen ratio.
