Psychiatrists to analyse children’s use of tech

PSYCHIATRISTS are to assess all children they treat for the impact of social media on their mental health under new guidelines by their Royal College.

For the first time, parents and children will be routinely asked about their technology use because of growing evidence of links between harmful content or excessive time spent online and poor mental health.

The unprecedented move by the Royal College of Psychiatrists comes just weeks before the Government unveils its White Paper proposals for a statutory duty of care on tech firms to force them to do more to protect children from online harms.

The college confirmed it was formally endorsing a statutory duty of care, for which The Daily Telegraph has been campaigning since last summer.

The college, which has 18,000 members, is also recommending children stop using technology at least an hour before bed and avoid using technology at mealtimes.

It is in line with similar advice by the chief medical officer and the Royal College of Paediatricians.

It is also demanding the tech giants set aside a slice of their multi-million profits to fund research into the links between technology use and children’s mental health. The proportion of children with mental health issues has increased six-fold in the past two decades, according to a national study of 140,000 people aged 4-24.

Dr Bernadka Dubicka, the chairman of the college’s child and adolescent faculty, said she regularly saw young people who had deliberately hurt themselves after discussing self-harm techniques online.

“Clinicians recognise the well-known phenomena of young people copying each other’s harmful behaviour while on inpatient units but it’s even more worrying to see this replicated in the online world where audiences are so much bigger,”