Social media is destroying young people’s mental health. Why do we keep tiptoeing around this reality?

More than a quarter of a century ago, the headline from a Financial Times article on the development of mobile technology suggested that the “New generation of mobile phones will have little to do with talk”. This was the period, in 1998, of “the countdown to the introduction of third-generation [3G] cellular radio networks”. Ian Sugarbroad, then vice-president for business development at the telecoms equipment maker Nortel, noted that “the whole emphasis about third generation is not about voice at all”. Monica Horten, then a high-tech marketing specialist, was also quoted: we were entering, she suggested, a new phase of “infomedia” and the key to its success would be “the ability to deliver quality and people knowing who you are and trusting you”.
Horten focused on these and related themes subsequently; she became an independent policy adviser about online safety, technology and human rights and was recently appointed as an independent expert on the Council of Europe’s Committee of Experts on online safety. Her 2016 book, The Closing of the Net, underlined the scale of the corporate manipulation of the online space and the extent to which such vested interests rather than elected governors have dictated so much, undermining the original narrative of empowerment, through commercial control, surveillance, content personalisation, misuse of data and misinformation.
We’ve had 4G and 5G wireless technology in the years since the sidelining of the voice, with 6G likely to follow. Messaging and social-media platforms have reigned supreme, in effect replacing the phone. There was a hesitancy in the early smartphone days about sweeping indictments and labelling of behaviours, but the danger signals were obvious a few years after the emergence of the iPhone in 2007. As Colman Noctor, a psychotherapist at St Patrick’s Hospital put it in 2013, it was too early to assess the full cultural impact but “nowadays, people will take the iPad to the bathroom” or use smartphones in company as “the concept of being alone together is no longer enough for many”. In 2017, Irish Facebook users were spending eight hours a week on the platform, which rose to 10 hours in 2019; that same year the Sign of the Times Behaviour and Attitude survey suggested 50 per cent of users were checking emails when they could not sleep at night.
[ Doctors urge ban on ‘destructive’ smartphone use by children under age of 16Opens in new window ]
As for delivering quality and trust, we have been constantly reminded of the toxicity accompanying social media, and it is hardly unreasonable for medics, as happened this week with the Irish Medical Organisation, to decry the use of smartphones and the social media content on them as “overwhelmingly destructive to children”.
The stridency of the IMO’s language – it refers to “a public health emergency” and a “vicious circle of use” – is justified and follows similarly robust comments earlier this year from psychiatrist Matthew Sadlier, chairman of the consultant committee of the IMO. He pointed to “overwhelming evidence that excessive social media use leads to greater levels of negative wellbeing and mental health issues”. All indicators of mental health and psychological wellbeing among teenagers and young adults have become more negative since 2012 in tandem with the proliferation of social media use, including anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicidal tendencies among adolescents. These have been exacerbated by “the algorithms of social media platforms, many of which use features such as infinite scroll to promote more user activity”. For those reasons alone, we need urgent proof of the assertion of Taoiseach Simon Harris earlier this month that the era of self-regulation for tech giants is “well and truly over”.
It is true many schools have devised their own policies and regulations in relation to smartphone use, some of them effective. But it is the lack of appetite for real regulation at the wider level that reveals so much about the power imbalance. Marketing professor Adam Alter’s book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology (2017) offers perspectives on how addiction has been engineered historically and, considering more recent developments, the consequences for children and social development: “a brain raised on online friendships can never fully adjust to interactions in the real world”. The constant checking and scrolling also creates obvious focus and attention issues.
While proposals to ban smartphone use by those under the age of 16 will inevitably polarise opinion, we cannot constantly highlight the crisis in the mental health of teenagers and young adults while tiptoeing around the reality that what was supposed to empower has become horribly enervating. The cruel irony is that what was sold as smart communication has, for far too many, become a barrier to meaningful connection and has increased isolation, as talking has been cast aside. I know very few working in education who have not lamented the baleful influence of smartphone addiction and the silence of spaces once full of real voices and connections.