Let’s get social in real life, our children will benefit from it
Young ones turn to the internet when help is difficult to access or even non-existent in the real, physical world
UK teenager Molly Russell, just 14 years old, reportedly took her own life in 2017 after viewing disturbing content on Instagram. It possibly encouraged suicide or a suicidal outlook. Molly Russell’s father, according to the BBC and other outlets, said he believed Instagram “helped kill my daughter”.
The headlines became: ‘Social media firms could be banned if they fail to remove harmful content, the health secretary has warned’.
Matt Hancock, the UK Health Minister, said during an interview on January 27 that he was “horrified” to learn of Molly Russell’s death.
Just a day or so later, the Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, waded in, with a widely reported open letter to tech firms, declaring: “The tragic suicide of Molly Russell and her father’s appalled response to the material she was viewing on social media before her death have again highlighted the horrific amount of disturbing content that children are accessing online…. I do not think it is going too far to question whether even you, the owners (of tech companies), any longer have any control over their content”.
Suicide-encouraging sites should be regulated, and promotion of suicide over the Internet is already censored to some extent by electronic filtering. Encouraging suicide is illegal in Australia, yet remains legal in Japan, which has one of the highest suicide rates in the world.
But maybe people, particularly children, turn to the internet when in the real physical world services are difficult to access at best, or even nonexistent. Perhaps the link between social media use and suicide in children tells us something about children’s perceptions about turning to mental health services supposedly designed for them and should create a call to do better in that area.
A 2015 Canadian study attempted to examine social media use and suicidal thinking in 753 middle and high school children in Ottawa. This research found that during the prior 12 months, of those who reported low use of social-networking sites such as Instagram and Facebook, only 5.5 per cent seriously considered attempting suicide, while the proportion jumped to 24.9 per cent for those visiting these sites for more than two hours each day.
The study, published in the academic journal,
also found that students who reported that they wanted to talk to someone about a mental health or emotional problem, but didn’t know where to turn, were also more likely to engage in heavier social networking site usage than those who were able to communicate with someone in the real world about emotional issues.
Maybe as we get older, we get better at handling life’s trials, and perhaps we engage with social media differently. Being seen as ‘mental’ by friends means mental health issues might be particularly stigmatising and embarrassing for younger adolescents, so they don’t seek help in the real world, and maybe as a result turn to the internet for help.
The Ottawa study into Canadian school students reported on earlier, found that heavy social media usage was associated with an elevated chance of suicidal thinking by 5.9 times. Again, association does not imply causation. It is always possible that the causality is running in the other direction, maybe more suicidal school students tend to take to social media more.
There is, however, a grave danger that simply blaming the internet, diverts attention away from the provision of good mental health services, which could yet save more lives than regulating the internet but won’t get a politician on TV. And good mental health services for children means more than just issuing a drug prescription, although for hardpressed child and adolescent services, a pill is increasingly what parents seem to be offered.
One theory as to why prescribing antidepressants in adolescents might be possibly more risky than with adults is that, according to Professor Healy and his coauthors, ‘emotional numbness’ has been reported as a side effect. This so-called “care less syndrome” might reduce empathy for others. It is this emotion that functions as a key inhibitor to acting on suicidal impulses. It might also create a state of emptiness and lifelessness that can become unbearable to the young person.
No one is arguing that no child anywhere cannot be helped by these drugs. Instead, the research is merely pointing out that looking after children may be a lot more complex than just prescribing a pill. We kind of knew that already for adults, yet we may have forgotten that the same principle applies to children, perhaps even more so. No one should suddenly stop any treatment but go and talk to their doctor to have their prescription reviewed and inquire as to whether additional nonpharmacological treatments can be tried.
The very basis of the operation of internet giants such as Facebook and Google is to detect our preferences and show us more of what we want, rather than what we really need. Maybe someone should devise an internet search engine that constantly sends you what you really ought to know about, but would prefer not to.
Oh wait, traditional paper press kind of tried doing that for centuries, and look what happened to them after the arrival of web search algorithms.
Since the very basis of our economy is that we ever more efficiently give people what they want, rather than what they need, we could be more searching of ourselves and the society we have created, if we are going to properly tackle child mental health.
We need to examine more deeply ourselves, and the world we are creating, and insisting our children grow into.
We could be more searching of ourselves and the society we have created, if we are going to properly tackle child mental health.