Consider This from NPR - How Social Media Use Impacts Teen Mental Health

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

The idea that social media use has helped fuel an increase in anxiety, depression and loneliness among teenagers was once controversial. But a series of studies are helping researchers understand how much of a correlation exists between the two. NPR's Michaeleen Doucleff tells us about Jean Twenge, a researcher who first raised the alarm in 2017, and about other researchers who have recently released studies on this topic.And NPR's Allison Aubrey shares some advice from another study looking into ways to minimize social media's impact.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. In 2017, Jean Twenge started a firestorm in the field of psychology. Twenge studies health metrics across generations in America. And when she looked at data for Gen Zers, who are now teenagers and young adults, she saw signs of a mental health crisis on the horizon. Rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness were rising and fast. She had a hypothesis for why smartphones and social media. Smartphones were used by the

majority of Americans around 2012, and that's the same time loneliness increases. That's very suspicious. That is Twenge speaking on All Things Considered in 2017. I think many parents are worried about their teens driving and going out with their friends and drinking. Yet, parents are often not worrying about their teen who stays at home but is on their phone all the time. They go, oh, that's just how teens are. So they should be worried about that. At the time, many of her colleagues didn't agree with Twenge. They thought she had

way too little data to make such claims and that she was unnecessarily causing a panic. In the years since, the rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness in teens have continued to skyrocket, exacerbated by the isolation of the pandemic. The data is particularly concerning for girls and LGBTQ youth. A report by the Centers for Disease Control released earlier this year examined data from 2021 and found nearly three out of five U.S. teen girls felt persistently sad or hopeless. Nearly one in three had seriously considered committing suicide. One in five teens who identified as LGBTQ had actually attempted suicide. Consider this. Six years since Jean Twenge raised the alarm, science is finally catching up with

her. After the break, we hear more from Twenge and other researchers exploring the impact of social media on teens' mental health, and we'll explore ways to minimize its effect. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Thursday, April 27th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. It's Consider This from NPR. Six years after Jean Twenge shared her hypothesis that social media was causing deteriorating mental health in teens, she's back with a new book called Generations.

In it, she analyzes the mental health of five generations of teens, going's back with a new book called Generations. In it, she analyzes the mental health of five generations of teens going all the way back to 1925, and she updates with the fundamental changes we have seen in just the past decade. The way teens spend their time outside of school has fundamentally changed. Take, for instance, hanging out with friends face-to-face. For decades, the time teens spent socializing in person stayed pretty steady. But then, in 2010, it nosedived. It's just like a black diamond ski slope, straight down these really, really big changes. And at the same time, social media use began to soar. NPR's Michaelene Ducliffe spoke with Twenge about what her research makes of that. A poll from the Pew Research Center finds that about 95% of teens now use some social media, and about a third say they use it constantly. And this is not a small number of people either.

In the most recent data, 22% of 10th grade girls spend seven or more hours a day on social media. That's like they're not doing anything else besides going to school, right? Yep, that's correct. Not surprisingly, with all this screen time, Twenge finds that teens are getting much less sleep than they did a decade ago. Today, nearly half of high school seniors sleep less than seven hours a night. Kids in that age group are supposed to be getting nine hours a night. And 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. And unfortunately, all those mental health problems have continued to increase. Across the board since 2010, there have been increases in anxiety, depression, 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. All of these changes coincide with what may be the most rapid uptake in a new technology in human history, the uptake of smartphones and social media. Twenge has hypothesized for years now that they're connected. Chris Saeed is a data scientist with a PhD in psychology from Princeton.

He has also worked at Facebook and Twitter and agrees that the timing is hard to ignore. 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. But the timing doesn't answer the critical question. Does social media cause teens to become depressed? Scientists have published many studies addressing this question, does social media cause teens to become depressed? Scientists have published many studies addressing this question, but Saeed says here's the thing people don't realize. In these studies, they haven't been using or really even had the proper tools to answer the question. So the findings have been all over the place, murky, noisy, inconclusive, and confusing. 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. But now, scientists have better tools. Over the past few years, several high-quality studies have come out that can directly test whether or not social media causes depression. And the picture is getting clearer. Matthew Jensko is an economist at Stanford University. He says the best study just came out last November. It's from scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I really love that paper, and I think that paper is probably the most convincing thing I have seen. In the study, researchers took advantage of what was really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,

the rollout of Facebook on college campuses way back in 2004 to 2006. When Facebook was introduced, it exploded so quickly. You know, everybody on campus had it in a very short period of time. But not every campus got Facebook at the same time. The rollout was staggered. And the staggered rollout is experimental gold. It allowed scientists to measure how the mental health of students changed on a campus as many students started using social media. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of students on over 300 campuses. You're looking at the impact of

Facebook being introduced to an entire university. The researchers could also track students' mental health because at the time, colleges were administering a national survey about mental health with questions about concrete behaviors. Things like visits to the university health system for mental health and medications and things like that. What they found was almost immediately after Facebook arrives, there's an uptick in many mental health issues like depression and anxiety. The researchers estimate that Facebook caused about 2% of college students to become

depressed. That would mean more than 300,000 more young adults suffering from depression. I think that shows clear effects. It's really credible. Of course, there are limitations. For starters, it's Facebook, which teens are using less and less. And it's a very early version of Facebook. There was no newsfeed or like button, so the version wasn't as potent as social media now. But other recent studies support these findings, including one led by Jensco. In that study, his team paid adults to quit Facebook for four weeks, and then they measured people's mental health changes. Across the board, people felt better on average

after a break from Facebook. You see higher happiness, life satisfaction, lower depression, lower anxiety, and maybe a little bit lower loneliness. Jansko says there's still a lot to learn about social media and the mental health of teens, but a few ideas are really crystallizing. In particular, social media won't hurt everyone.

Recent data suggests younger teens and preteens might be the most vulnerable to it. And while social media isn't the only cause of mental health problems in teens today, it is a cause, and it's something society, communities, parents, and teens themselves should take seriously and be extremely careful with. That was NPR's Michaelene Duclef. As Matthew Jensko's study proved, a break away from social media can make a difference in how adults feel. But could limiting social media also mitigate its harmful effects on teens and young adults? NPR's Alison Aubrey reports on a study that set out to find the answer.

There are not too many college students who are able to turn their thesis project into a randomized controlled trial published in a peer-reviewed journal. But for Helen Tai, her focus on how social media can influence body image and appearance came at just the right time. Her hunch was that many people were being negatively influenced by social media. That's what she experienced personally. What I noticed when I was engaging in social media was that I couldn't help but compare myself, whether it be posts from celebrities or people within my social network. They looked prettier, healthier, more fit. That led to feelings of inferiority. Now a doctoral student in psychology, she wanted to determine if others felt this too. So she and her collaborators recruited a couple of hundred volunteers, age 17 to 25, all of whom

had experienced anxiety, who were in the habit of using social media about two to three hours each day. The volunteers were divided into two groups. The first group agreed to slash their time on social media. We asked them to reduce their social media to 60 minutes a day for three weeks. The other group continued to use social media with no restrictions. All of the participants agreed to share their smartphones daily screen time tracker so researchers could keep tabs, and they also agreed to take surveys that asked a bunch of questions about body image and appearance. So an example would be a statement like, I wish I looked better, or I'm looking as nice as I'd like to, or I'm pretty happy about the way I look. The survey was given at the beginning of the study,

and again after just three weeks of limiting social media. Tai says in such a short period, she actually documented a change. What our study showed was that participants who were asked to reduce their daily social media use significantly improved in appearance and weight esteem. It's not that their weight or appearance changed, but how they felt about their looks and their bodies did change for the better. It's not a surprise, says Lexi Kite, a body image expert and co-director of the non-profit Beauty Redefined. She says what's so anxiety-provoking is that social media platforms are full of body-centric images and people can alter or airbrush the way they look. You can use filters that come up on TikTok very easily to add makeup, curves, a tan, slim yourself down, take away all pores, wrinkles, hair. Scrolling this kind of content can have a powerful influence on teens,

and especially young women, at a vulnerable time when they're trying to figure out who they are, what they stand for, and what gives them power. So Instagram and TikTok take the harmful cultural messages we've all grown up with, primarily that women are most valued for their beauty and sex appeal, and not only reinforces those messages, but magnifies them to a level that cements those value systems into their brains. And, you know, kids can't escape it. Especially if all their peers are using social media. Lexi Kite says cutting back makes a lot of sense. And another strategy is to minimize body-centric content in your feed. Be incredibly mindful as you scroll of how each creator, each image, each account makes you feel. If a post makes you feel uncomfortable or less

than, make a choice to mute or unfollow. You are the only one who can curate your feed, and the platforms surely won't. They are pushing. The algorithm is pushing body-centric and idealized content to you because that's what sells. So try to zero in on alternative content from users who share things that align with your values and interest. Kite says if you explore, there's a lot of positive content to engage with. NPR's Alison Aubrey, and if you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Support for NPR and I'm Mary Louise Kelly.