The Debate Over Teens, Screens, and Mental Health

This week’s article summary is The Scientific Debate Over Teens, Screens, and Mental Health.

I liked this article because it looks at both sides of current hot topic: to what extent smartphone and social media use by teenagers contributes to the significant  increase in their anxiety and depression.

The author (an NPR reporter) interviewed three people with very different opinions: a strong proponent of the interconnection between social media use and anxiety in teens, one who sees little to no connection, and one who falls in the middle.

Take the time to read the article because it is a great example of the either/or thinking that often dominates education—sort of like the whole language/phonics and debate.

By the end of the article all three interviewees agree on middle-of-the road, practical recommendations, such as limiting teen technology use and trying to provide guidance for teens around its use rather than demonizing technology and hence sending the message to teens that they can’t talk to parents about the challenges they face negotiating their social media presence.

Clearly, anxiety, depression, and suicide have become much more prevalent in today’s teens. It may be simple to place the blame on the ubiquity of technology, yet we need to resist this either/or thinking and delve more deeply into why teens suffer. Last week’s summary posited some other reasons for teens being disaffected today, including the messages we send teens today about excelling in all endeavors all the time.

When I was a kid, TV was the negative influence (I think I turned out fine.). When I began teaching, it was explicit lyrics in music. (My students by and large turned out fine.) When my kids were little, it was video games. (At least to me they turned out fine.) Now it’s social media. (I’m guessing the vast majority of students today will turn out fine too.)

Joe

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More teens and young adults — particularly girls and young women — are reporting being depressed and anxious, compared with comparable numbers from the mid-2000s. Suicides are up too in that time period, most noticeably among girls ages 10 to 14.

These trends are the basis of a scientific controversy. One hypothesis that has gotten a lot of traction is that with nearly every teen using a smartphone these days, digital media must take some of the blame for worsening mental health.

But some researchers argue that this theory isn't well supported by existing evidence and that it repeats a "moral panic" argument made many times in the past about video games, rap lyrics, television and even radio, back in its early days.

To understand both sides of the debate, I talked in detail to three researchers: one who argues that teens' use of tech is a big problem, one who thinks the danger is exaggerated, and an expert in research methodology who suggests the connection may not be so simple.

Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, may be the researcher most associated with the idea that smartphones are dangerous to teens. She's the author of the book iGen.

"At first, when I saw these trends in loneliness and unhappiness and depression starting to spike around 2011 or 2012, I really had no idea what could possibly be causing that. It was a real mystery," she tells NPR. Then, she says, she took note of Pew research that showed 2012 was the first year that most cell phone owners had switched to smartphones. Not only do these two trend lines seem to coincide in time, but Twenge also notes that young people who report spending the most time on smartphones — five to seven hours a day — are twice as likely to report being depressed as those who use their phones for one to two hours a day.

Twenge isn't claiming to have proved that smartphones cause depression. “We have to go on the limited data that we have but to me it adds up to a lot of evidence pointing toward technology playing a role in this increase in mental health issues."

Given that all teens use media, I asked Twenge, why would the worsening trend in mental health be more pronounced in girls than in boys? She responded with social media, which girls tend to spend more time on, may be the culprit. "Social media invites comparison," Twenge says. "It invites anxiety over the likes and responses that you're going to get."

Given that adults use media even more than teenagers, why does this trend crop up in teens? Twenge says teenagers haven't had as much time to make social connections in real life as older people have, so they are even more dependent on their phones for social validation. Twenge even thinks that the availability of smartphones could help explain the rise in suicide rates among the youngest girls. "They have more access to information online — potentially harmful information about how to harm yourself."

My final question for Twenge: She, personally, made a very similar argument about young people before smartphones existed. She previously published a book, Generation Me, that looked at similar data sets and labeled the millennial generation as "miserable," "narcissistic" and "anxious." That book came out in 2006; the iPhone was introduced in 2007. Is she putting old wine in new bottles? Twenge says that comparing then with now, mental health trends are even more negative for what she calls iGen and, in retrospect, "more of a mixed bag" for millennials.

Some researchers are skeptical of the hypothesis that smartphones cause problems.

Amy Orben, a psychologist and researcher at Oxford University, says that the actual negative relationship between teens' mental health and technology use is tiny. "A teenagers' technology use can only explain less than 1% of variation in well-being.”

How can this be? Well, smartphone use is almost ubiquitous among teenagers today, while only a small minority report mental health problems. So, knowing that a teenager uses a smartphone, even for many hours a day, won't reliably predict that the teenager will become depressed. It tells you far, far less than factors like genetics or the presence of childhood trauma, for example.

Orben has been researching the history of people making dire claims about young people and new forms of media. For example, she says, "In the 1940s, people were already talking about radio addiction."

She thinks the negative trends in mental health could be explained by a wide range of factors: economic anxiety or political upheaval, to name two. And, she adds, there's a chance that young people today may simply be more open in surveys when asked about mental health challenges. "A lot of teenagers are a lot more OK to say they're not OK." Ironically, this openness may in fact be partly due to social media.

As a sort of referee on this debate, I called up Katherine Keyes, a professor  of Public Health at Columbia University. Her focus is on explaining population-wide trends, particularly in adolescent mental health. She too is a critic of Twenge's work, saying it has a tendency to "skew the data" by zooming in on screen use to the exclusion of other factors in the lives of adolescents. She says there are lots of numbers that don't necessarily fit Twenge's theory. The uptick in suicides started in 1999. The downturn in teen mental health started in 2005. The iPhone was introduced in 2007 and wasn't accessible to most teenagers for several years. We're also not seeing the same negative trends in every country, even in those where teens are just as glued to their screens as they are in the United States.

The explanation that Keyes finds most compelling is that there is a "bidirectional" relationship among teens, screens and mental health. In other words, teens who are already struggling may be more drawn to screens and more likely to form unhealthy relationships with media, for example by seeking out information on self-harm or encountering cyberbullies. The time they spend online might in turn make them feel worse.

Although their conclusions are different, no researcher I've spoken with thinks it's a great idea to let teens be on their smartphone for extended periods of time.

Twenge, Orben and Keyes are all supportive of similar common-sense rules, like making sure teens don't have their phones in their bedrooms late at night and trying to ensure that their lives are balanced with outdoor exercise, school and face-to-face time with friends and family.

So why should the average parent worry about this scientific controversy? Because, Keyes says, when parents simply demonize phones, "there's less of a communications channel" about what teens are encountering online. A parent's opportunity to mentor or support positive uses of media is replaced by "confrontation on a day-to-day basis." Well-meaning parents, wrongly believing the phone to be as risky as a cigarette or a beer, may actually be making their children's lives harder by fighting with them about it.