What does cell phones have to do with depression in teenagers – 11/12/2023 – Equilíbrio

It’s something that we might think we know intuitively: too many cell phones are bad for mental health, especially that of teenagers.

Every year, we see news reports of mental health crises among young people. We can even feel, in our own lives, the effects of excessive smartphone use. Younger people have also been spending more time than ever on their cell phones, and this is something that anyone who lives with them can see.

It turns out that the link between mental health and excessive use of the device is more difficult to prove than one might think.

What Screen Time Does to Teens

A new study conducted in South Korea and recently published in the journal PLOS ONE investigates what an increase in screen time means for adolescents’ mental health.

The topic is not exactly new; For years, researchers have tried to quantify the extent to which mobile technology and social media are harmful to young people. However, this is the first time that an investigation of this type has been conducted on a national scale, with two rounds of interviews in 2017 and 2020 and more than 40,000 participants, who reported how many hours a day they spent on the phone, on average.

Teens were also asked about mental health, substance use and obesity.

The researchers detected a significant increase in screen time between 2017 and 2020: if before 30% reported screen time exceeding 4 hours a day, three years later this number jumped to 55%.

What’s more: the more time these young people spent on their phones, the worse the rates of negative impacts on mental health, illicit substance abuse and obesity.

But…

The results of the South Korean study are consistent with what is already known on the subject. The correlation between the increased use of cell phones and compromised mental health is indisputable. But the article’s deficiencies —highlighted by the researchers themselves— are significant.

The fact that the research is based on answers provided by the study participants themselves – although this is something very common in this type of study – is something that has been criticized by technology experts in recent years.

“Reported usage time may not be an estimate of actual usage time and may have been underestimated due to bias [que as pessoas têm] to provide socially desirable and acceptable responses,” the paper’s authors wrote.

Additionally, the researchers acknowledged a second limitation of the study: They didn’t monitor what exactly these young people were doing on their phones – TikTok? Games? Long video calls with friends?

This additional information could help to better understand and clarify the impacts of smartphone use on mental health.

“We were unable to specify smartphone usage time according to purpose (e.g., social media use, text messaging, education, online shopping), which may have affected health outcomes,” the study states.

Measuring screen time makes no sense, argues psychologist

For Peter Etchells, professor of psychology and scientific communication at Bath Spa University in the United Kingdom, it makes no sense to measure screen time, as this concept “covers literally anything and everything.”

“Researchers have been calling for a more nuanced approach for many years, one that considers more specific content and the context of use,” he says.

He says it’s easy to measure screen time as a mere number in research articles, but that alone doesn’t reveal much. “If you imagine two people reporting three hours of screen time per day, those three hours can cover such a wide range of activities that it’s unwise to try to correlate that simple number with something else, like well-being.”

Etchells, who is working on a book about the science of screen time, argues that the question researchers should be asking is not what the relationship is between increased screen time and mental health, but rather, “Why do some People struggle using digital technology, while others seem to thrive?”

In other words: when it comes to measuring the impact of cell phones on mental health, the important metric to use is not how long we use the technology, but rather what we do when we use it, and how these activities may or may not affect our mental health. mental health.