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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Guardian: As a child psychiatrist, I see what smartphones are doing to kids' mental health
The online world is forcing children to grow up before they are ready, and parents need governments help to combat its harms
Emily Sehmer
Fri 3 Jan 2025 05.00 EST
Smartphone use among children has reached a critical moment. Many of us in the UK are increasingly aware of the dangers associated with them and as a child and adolescent psychiatrist, I am more worried than most. I am witnessing at first hand the sheer devastation that smartphone use is wreaking on our young peoples mental health. The majority of children over 10 I see at my NHS clinic now have a smartphone. An increasingly large proportion of patients have difficulties that are related to, or exacerbated by, their use of technology.
We are seeing profound mental illness stemming from excessive social media use, online bullying, screen addiction, or falling prey to online child sexual exploitation. We are seeing children who are disappearing into online worlds, who are unable to sleep, who are increasingly inattentive and impulsive, emotionally dysregulated and aggressive. Children crippled by anxiety or a fear of missing out. Who spend hours alone, cut off from those who love them, who spend hour upon hour speaking to strangers.
Children and adolescents are increasingly seeking comfort and validation from peer groups online. Unfortunately, some of these encourage self-harm, eating disorder behaviours and even suicide. I looked after a young person last year who struggled significantly with their mental health and prolific self-harm. I was later informed that they were uploading their experience and behaviours on TikTok and had livestreamed content from within A&E departments and an inpatient psychiatric ward to thousands of followers and well-wishers.
Childrens self-esteem and self-image is also at an all-time low, and levels of depression and suicidal thoughts have never been higher. It is no secret among mental health professionals that there is a direct link between smartphone use and real-world harms.
The average UK 12-year-old now spends 29 hours a week equivalent to a part-time job on their smartphone. To have access to the amount of information they do at such a young age is having a profound impact on their neurological development. Where in the past we might have received a handful of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) referrals each week, we are now inundated. Parents cant get their children to sleep or sit still. They struggle to concentrate in school and education has taken an all-time hit. As adults, we see how our attention span has been affected in the years since our lives have gone online. I cant remember the last time I saw someone watch a film without scrolling through their phone or checking their messages. Our brains are changing and children are not immune to this.
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Mike 03
(17,522 posts)I'm convinced many of these warnings apply to all human beings, regardless of age.
I've watched an intelligent woman in her 70s descend into Q-Anon level thinking over the last eight years. She loves the telegram channels, especially the alternative health channels that sprouted during the COVID pandemic. She used to spend many hours each day, and well into the wee hours of the morning, conducting what she called "research" which consisted of getting health and political advice from strangers who distrust government, or reading the rantings of quacks in various fields. She is no longer the person I met 25 years ago.
jimfields33
(19,382 posts)eppur_se_muova
(37,801 posts)We can walk and chew gum at the same time.
bucolic_frolic
(47,800 posts)no_hypocrisy
(49,370 posts)From the Fifth Grade on up, students are nearly militant about putting down their phones instead of learning and doing classwork. They can be told not to look at their phones for a 40-minute class and some just can't do it. You can threaten them with school discipline, but it means nothing. And it distracts others who DO want to learn and do the work.
Parents justify their children having phones in school -- in order to be in contact with their children 24/7 in case of a crisis or their children can alert them in the event of an emergency, e.g., fire or school shooting.
There aren't enough vice principals in any given school to enforce a "no phones" policy.
spapeggy
(109 posts)Many school districts have a zero tolerance phone policy. Its gotten so bad that even parents claiming they need to be in touch with little Johnnie have given up claiming that cellphones are a necessity.
sop
(11,777 posts)The damage begins at an early age, and only worsens as people continue using devices as adults.
Unladen Swallow
(371 posts)Jonathan Haidt and his team is the gold standard here.
2naSalit
(93,870 posts)DavidDvorkin
(19,975 posts)I'm so behind the times on the latest thing that's ruining our kids.
It's hard to keep up. I wonder what the next bogeyman will be.
Intractable
(649 posts)DavidDvorkin
(19,975 posts)Elessar Zappa
(16,193 posts)Somethings always ruining the children. When I was young, it was video games and heavy metal music.
Intractable
(649 posts)Constant access to social media is destroying them cognitively and emotionally.
I watch my niece go from a beautiful, sociable, 14-year-old kid to a depressed, angry, boozing, promiscuous 18-year-old, who has the most f*cked up attitudes toward people.
At 14, she asked me for a smartphone. I gave her one with the parent's permission.
dalton99a
(85,079 posts)Jedi Guy
(3,324 posts)On paper it sounds great, though, doesn't it? Allowing people to connect through shared interests without regard to geographical boundaries or, with the rise of AI translation, even language barriers. It's a late-rising aspect of the Internet which was touted as a way to unite humanity and give everyone access to knowledge.
In practice, though, social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others are a complete cesspool that encourage the worst behaviors. Their algorithms are designed to drive outrage and spread it far and wide. As noted in the article, they amplify voices without regard to the content of the message. I heard a song lyric recently that immediately made me think of social media. "We're deafened by the naive while we silence the wise." (Can't Go to Hell by Sin Shake Sin, if anyone's interested)
They charge nothing for this "product" because the app is not the product. The user is the product, and in the eyes of the makers of these apps, users aren't people. Users are a collection of data points which can be bought, sold, traded, or stolen, and ultimately used to sell us more stuff or drive us to engage in other behaviors.
Social media also encourages a particularly malignant kind of narcissism, in my opinion. People put literally every detail of their lives online for the consumption of total strangers, people they don't know and will almost certainly never meet. They derive validation from how many followers they have and, for all intents and purposes, the click is the new currency of the digital age. People engage in stunts, from the outrageous to the annoying to the deadly, simply out of a desire to gain followers and get clicks.
Perhaps as a result of being a late Gen Xer, I missed out on the social media craze. I used Facebook for a couple years before growing bored of it and canceling my account. I don't flatter myself that my life is interesting... because it isn't. I get up, go to work, deal with work stuff, come home, walk the dog, make dinner, and then dink around the house or play video games or watch movies. Riveting stuff, it ain't.
And at the end of the day, our political leaders largely can't hold these social media companies to account for what they do. We trust them to regulate and police themselves because they pinkie promised that they're super concerned about these problems and will absolutely make solving them a top priority.
I think we'd all be better off if Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. had never come to be. A pox on all their houses.