The Toll Of Social Media On Mental Health

This episode explores the relationship between social media usage and mental health issues, especially among teens.

1. The increase in mental health issues among teens correlates with the rise in smartphone and social media usage.
2. Historical patterns show societal tendency to blame new technologies for youth issues, yet current data supports the negative impact of social media.
3. Major studies indicate that high social media usage directly contributes to higher rates of depression and anxiety.
4. The changes in how teens socialize, including less face-to-face interaction and more screen time, significantly impact their mental health.
5. Managing social media use is crucial, especially for teens, to mitigate risks to mental health.

1: Introduction to the Social Media Crisis

An overview of the growing concern about social media's impact on mental health, especially among teens. Regina Barber introduces the topic and sets the stage for an in-depth discussion. Michaeline Duclef: "Social media runs our lives, and it's a powerful force."

2: Historical Perspectives and Current Data

Discussion on past technologies blamed for mental health issues and how social media compares. Includes insights into shifting patterns of teen social behavior since the introduction of smartphones. Jean Twenge: "Loneliness increases around the same time smartphones were used by the majority."

3: The Science of Social Media and Mental Health

Exploration of new research supporting the hypothesis that social media contributes significantly to mental health decline. Highlights studies showing causation between social media use and depression. Michaeline Duclef: "The science is finally catching up."

4: Implications and Actionable Steps

Final thoughts on how individuals and parents can manage social media usage to protect mental health. Emphasis on practical measures to reduce exposure and potential harms. Regina Barber: "Prioritize self-care and limit social media usage."

1. Monitor and Limit Use: Keep track of time spent on social media and set daily limits.
2. Engage in Face-to-Face Interactions: Encourage more in-person socializing.
3. Promote Healthy Sleep Habits: Ensure technology use does not interfere with sleep.
4. Educate on Media Literacy: Teach critical thinking about online interactions and media consumption.
5. Seek Professional Help if Needed: Don't hesitate to consult mental health professionals for guidance and support.

Rates of depression and anxiety have risen among teens over the last decade. Amid this ongoing mental health crisis, the American Psychological Association issued guidelines for parents to increase protection for teens online. In this encore episode, NPR science correspondent Michaeleen Doucleff looks into the data on how that change has impacted the mental health of teenagers. In her reporting, she found that the seismic shift of smartphones and social media has re-defined how teens socialize, communicate and even sleep. In 2009, about half of teens said they were using social media daily, reported psychologist Jean Twenge. And by 2022, 95% of teens said they used some social media, and about a third said they use it constantly.

People

Jean Twenge, Regina Barber, Michaeline Duclef, Chris Saeed, Matthew Ginsko

Books

Generations

Content Warnings:

None

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Regina Barber
You're listening to short wave from NPR.

Hey, short waivers. Regina Barber here with NPR science correspondent Michaeline Duclef. Hey.

Michaeline Duclef
Hi, Regina.

Regina Barber
So, Michaeline, we've brought you on to talk about something that's been on my mind these days, especially having a daughter about to start high school. It's social media and mental health.

Michaeline Duclef
Oh, gosh, me too, Regina. I have a daughter. She's a little bit younger, but I still worry about it because for me personally, social media has not been very healthy. You know, it makes me feel bad. So I pretty much got off of it a while ago. And I have to say I feel better.

Regina Barber
Right? Of course. But sometimes it feels like social media runs our lives. It's such a powerful force.

Michaeline Duclef
Yes. But I think the question is, especially for teens and kids, is it a negative force? Back in 2017, a psychologist at San Diego State University, her name is Jean Twenge, set off this firestorm in psychology. She studies trends across generations and she looks at data going all the way back to the 1930s. And when she looked at mental health data for teens starting around 20, 1111 or so, she was shocked.

Regina Barber
Oh, no. What shocked her?

Michaeline Duclef
Well, across the board, she could see rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness. They were all rising right around 2011, 2012. And she had this hypothesis that the reason for this mental health crisis that she saw coming was smartphones.

Jean Twenge
Smartphones were used by the majority of Americans around 2012. And that's the same time loneliness increases. That's very suspicious.

Michaeline Duclef
That's Jean back in 2017 on all Things Considered. And at the time, some of her colleagues were upset. They said her data was too weak to make these big claims and that she was worrying parents for no reason.

Well, Jean is back. She has a new book and a lot more data. And after doing a lot of research myself, I can see that the science is finally catching up with her.

Regina Barber
So today on the show, how that data stacks up years later, we have a fraught relationship with social media. But should we finally call it quits? Youre listening to short wave from NPR.

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Regina Barber
Okay, Michaeline, I've tried to make a whole mystery earlier to kind of intrigue listeners, but I think social media is generally pretty bad, right?

Michaeline Duclef
I mean, I think a lot of people feel that way. But what I didn't realize was that in the past century, psychologists and society has often blamed new technologies for kids problems, even their mental health problems. And they do this even with no data or shady data.

One example is that back in the 1940s, psychologists blamed radio crime stories for kids mental health problems, and then they blame comic books and then television.

Regina Barber
Yep, I remember.

Michaeline Duclef
So as a scientist, I started wondering, like, what does the science, what does the data actually say about social media and teen mental health? And is social media like a radio crime drama that maybe we shouldn't worry too much about? Or is it really, like, you know, smoking in cigarettes? Like, is the worry warranted?

Regina Barber
Okay, so let's dive into the science. What has Jean found since she last sounded that alarm?

Michaeline Duclef
Yeah, so Jean's book, it's called generations, she really shows something quite profound. She shows that in the past decade, for the Gen Z generation, the way.

Jean Twenge
Teens spend their time outside of school has fundamentally changed.

Michaeline Duclef
So take, for instance, hanging out with friends face to face without your parents. Jean looked at data going all the way back to the 1970s, and she found that the time that teens spend doing this, hanging out with friends, really stayed pretty constant until about 2004. And then it starts to decline a little bit. But then in 2010, it takes a nosedive.

Jean Twenge
It's just like a black diamond ski slope just straight down these really, really big changes.

Regina Barber
This is something I've actually talked to my daughter about. I'm like, why don't you just walk over to your friend's house and knock on the door like I used to when I was a kid? And she's like, people don't do that anymore.

Michaeline Duclef
It's like this seismic shift. And then at the same time, she shows that social media use has begun to soar.

Jean Twenge
And this is not a small number of people. In the most recent data, 22% of 10th grade girls spend seven or more hours a day on social media.

Michaeline Duclef
That's like they're not doing anything else besides going to school, right?

Jean Twenge
Yep, that's correct.

Regina Barber
This is alarming. That's so much time that can't be healthy.

Michaeline Duclef
You know, for one thing, all this screen time is cutting into kids sleep. So Jean also found that between 2010 and 2021, the percentage of 10th and 12th graders sleeping seven or less hours a night rose from a third to nearly a half.

Jean Twenge
Kids in that age group are supposed to be getting 9 hours a night. So this is a really serious problem. Sleep is absolutely crucial for physical health and for mental health. Not getting enough sleep is a major risk factor for anxiety and depression and self harm.

Regina Barber
So things have really escalated in the last decade?

Michaeline Duclef
Yes. Unfortunately, that's the case across the board.

Jean Twenge
Since 2010, there have been increases in anxiety, depression, in loneliness. And it's not just symptoms, it's also behaviors, things like emergency room visits for self harm, for suicide attempts, and completed suicides. All of those increased for teens.

Michaeline Duclef
And what Jean shows is that all these big, rapid changes in socializing, sleeping, communication, they all coincide with what may be the most rapid uptake in a new technology in human history, which has allowed people to have nearly non stop engagement with social media apps. Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, and by about 2012, 50% of American adults owned a smartphone.

Regina Barber
Well, now it's almost everyone.

Michaeline Duclef
Absolutely. I mean, to me, sometimes it feels like people have their phones, like, attached to their hands.

Regina Barber
You feel naked without it. You're right.

Michaeline Duclef
And the consensus among the researchers I talk to say this timing. Right, so we see this big change in mental health. Right at the time that smartphones are exploding, this timing is really hard to ignore. One of them is Chris Saeed. He's a data scientist. He also has a PhD in psychology.

He's also worked at Facebook and Twitter.

Chris Saeed
Social media was just like a nuclear bomb on teen social life. I don't think there's anything in recent memory or even distant history that has changed the way that teens socialize as much as social media.

Regina Barber
But correlation is not causation, as they say. Just because x and Y happened doesn't mean that x caused y.

Michaeline Duclef
Exactly right. I mean, just because the rise in depression is in these years doesn't necessarily mean social media is causing depression.

Regina Barber
But how are they gonna study that? I mean, you have other factors, like what's happening in reaction to the society we live in, cultural movements.

Michaeline Duclef
Absolutely. This has just been a really hard problem to solve. And what has happened is that scientists have published many studies trying to answer that question, does social media cause depression? But Saeed says, what people don't realize is that in these studies, scientists haven't been using or really even had the right tools to answer that question. They've been using what are called correlation studies, where they look to see how depression or life satisfaction varies with social media use. And so the findings have been all over the place. They've been noisy and murky, inconclusive and confusing.

Chris Saeed
This is a very hard problem to study. And when you use tools that can't fully answer the question, you're going to get weak answers. So I think that's one reason why really strong evidence didn't show up in the data, at least early on.

Regina Barber
So, Michaeline, do they now have strong studies that can look at causation?

Michaeline Duclef
Yes. So in the past several years, a couple high quality studies have come out directly measuring causation. And when I was interviewing scientists for this story, they kept bringing up one study in particular.

One of those scientists is Matthew Ginsko. He's an economist at Stanford University. And in this study, he says, researchers took advantage of really what was a once in a lifetime opportunity, the rollout of Facebook on college campuses. Back in 2004, 2006, when Facebook was.

Matthew Ginsko
Introduced, it exploded so quickly. You know, everybody on campus had it in a very short period of time.

Michaeline Duclef
But not every campus got Facebook right at the same time. So the rollout was staggered. And if you think about this, having a staggered rollout like this is experimental gold because it allows the researchers to directly measure students mental health before and after Facebook was introduced. And we're talking about hundreds of thousands of students on hundreds of campus. So the data, it's a big data set.

Matthew Ginsko
You're looking at the impact of Facebook being introduced to an entire university.

Michaeline Duclef
Luckily, the researchers could also track students mental health at the time because colleges were administering a national survey about mental health with a bunch of questions, not just about how students felt, but also about concrete behaviors, things like visits to.

Matthew Ginsko
The university health system for mental health and medications and things like that.

Regina Barber
After collecting all this data, what did they find?

Michaeline Duclef
Almost immediately after Facebook arrives on a campus, the researchers can detect this uptick in mental health issues.

With this data, they could estimate that Facebook caused about 2% of college students to become clinically depressed. And at the time, you know, there were 17 million college students, so we're talking about 300,000 more students suffering from depression.

Regina Barber
Okay, so what does this look like for a given person during that time?

Michaeline Duclef
Yeah, so they try to estimate that too. They look at how other bad events in people's life affect one's mental health. Say, for instance, like, if you lost your job, how would that impact your mental health? And they find that engaging with Facebook decreases a person's mental health by roughly about 22%.

Now, of course, Regina, there's a lot of limits to this study. Right. First of all, it's Facebook, which, you know, a lot of teens are using less and less. It's also a very old version of Facebook. This was a bare bones version of social media.

There was no, like, button. There was no newsfeed. So possibly this study underestimates the effect of Facebook.

Regina Barber
Okay, so what are the more recent studies dealing with current social media usage?

Michaeline Duclef
Yeah. So Matt Gensko at Stanford and his team did an experiment in 2018, and in it, they recruited about 2700 adults, and they paid half of them to deactivate their Facebook account for four weeks. And then they looked at how that affected these people's mental health. This is called a randomized experiment, which is typically the best way to estimate whether something is causing a problem or not. But again, there are limitations. This is a very short experiment. Nevertheless, they found that people, on average, felt better after leaving Facebook.

Matthew Ginsko
You see higher happiness, life satisfaction, lower depression, lower anxiety, and maybe a little bit lower loneliness. Wow.

Regina Barber
Okay. So it seems like the headline we're like, kind of wrapping around here, quit social media yesterday, if you haven't already.

Michaeline Duclef
I think what is becoming clear is that social media is a cause for depression. It is not the only cause. But I think also what is clear is that social media doesn't hurt every team or hurt every team by the same amount. The higher usage, so the more hours kids spend on it, the higher their risk is for depression, anxiety, and other mental health problems.

Regina Barber
Michaeline, thank you so much for bringing us this reporting and for reinforcing my personal and parenting instincts to really limit usage.

Michaeline Duclef
You're welcome. Thank you for having me.

Regina Barber
This episode was produced by Jane Greenhulsch with Liz Metzger. It was edited by Jane and our managing producer Rebecca Ramirez.

Mike Lean Duclef.

Jean Twenge
Check the facts.

Regina Barber
Our engineers were Nischa Hyness and Hans Copeland.

I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to short wave from NPrdez, NPR.

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