New proof that social media is damaging our young people

A DAMNING new report has uncovered more evidence of the damage that social media is doing to children’s mental health. The major study by University College London found that more than a third of 14-year-old girls who were heavy social media users suffer from clinical levels of depression.

Even among lighter users of social media, more than one in ten 14-year-old girls were also found to be depressed.

Similar effects were also seen in 14-year-old boys who used social media heavily.

The report, which studied almost 11,000 children, found that teenage girls are more likely than boys to suffer from

depressive symptoms linked to social media use – including sleep disruption, body weight dissatisfaction and low selfesteem. Girls are also more likely to be tormented by cyberbullies.

Some 40% of girls and 25% of boys had experience of being harassed or bullied online, while 40% of girls and 28% of boys said their sleep was disrupted ‘often’ or ‘most of the time’. The paper, published in the EClinicalMedicine journal, analysed data from nearly 11,000 14-year-olds.

The findings revealed that girls were heavier social media users than boys, with twofifths using social media platforms for more than three hours a day, compared with one-fifth of boys.

Only 4% of girls reported not using social media, compared

to 10% of boys.

UCL’s Professor Yvonne Kelly said: ‘For girls, greater daily hours of social media use corresponded to a stepwise increase in depressive symptoms. For boys, higher depressive symptom scores were seen among those reporting three or more hours of daily social media use.’

It is not the first warning issued that social media is having a harrowing effect on young people’s mental health. The report backs up alarming findings by researchers in the US, who have warned that smartphone use is having a devastating effect on a generation of children.

San Diego State University’s Professor Jean Twenge has warned that today’s teenagers

are ‘on the brink’ of a major mental health crisis.

Prof. Twenge’s widely praised work warned that ‘iGen’ – the age group who have not known life without the internet – are overindulging when it comes to social media and technology, which is leading to a rise in youth depression. She noted that the advent of the smartphone also coincides with a tripling of the suicide rate among girls in America.

She said this decline in mental

health came as the popularity of smartphones and social media began to soar. She said: ‘From 2011 to 2016, teens started spending much more time on social media and much less time with their friends, face-to-face.’

The new UCL study involved teenagers providing information on their social media use, online harassment, sleep patterns, self-esteem, and body image. They also completed a ‘Moods and Feelings’ questionnaire. Researchers found the most important routes from social media use to depressive symptoms were via poor sleep and online harassment.

Social media use was proportionately related to less sleep, taking more time to fall asleep and more disruptions during sleep. Depressive symptom scores were higher for girls and boys experiencing poor sleep.

The Irish Daily Mail’s Protect Our Kids Online campaign has highlighted warnings from a number of experts that social media is having a severe impact on the mental health of young people. This newspaper also successfully campaigned for the digital age of consent to be raised to 16 in May rather than the Government’s plan to set it at 13.

A letter sent by the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland to the Justice and Communications ministers ahead of the debate on the digital age of consent raised concerns about the effects of digital technology on children’s mental health.

Tripling of suicide rates in girls Sleep disruption, low self-esteem