Summary: A significant new study has revealed that teenagers who engage in persistent digital use are more likely to have suicidal ideas, attempts, and mental health issues. Contrary to total screen time, the addictive nature of use, such as stress when no website or using screens to escape, is what most clearly indicates poor outcomes.
Youth who had great and growing addictions to smartphones, video game, and social media were three times as likely to commit suicide. These findings emphasize the need for complex, early interventions that address problematic use rather than just limiting screen time.
Important Information
- Addiction vs. Duration: Addictive usage patterns were not the risk factor, but time spent on displays was.
- Teens who were reporting suicidal thoughts and behaviors were 2 to 3 times more likely to have an increased habit history.
- Behavioral Impact: Addictive use is related to both internalizing ( such as anxiety and depression ) and externalizing ( such as aggression ) symptoms.
Weill Cornell University as a resource
New research has discovered that young people who develop an increasing level of addiction to social media, wireless devices, or video games are more likely to have suicidal thoughts, attempt suicide, and experience emotional or behavioral problems.
Experts from Weill Cornell Medicine, Columbia University, and the University of California, Berkeley led the study, which was published on June 18 in JAMA.
This review examined how young person’s patterns of compulsive or “addictive” employ changed over time, in contrast to previous research that focused on full display day at one stage in a child’s life.
These patterns included difficulty letting go of a machine, experiencing stress when using it or using it to solve problems. In comparison, just spending more time on windows at the age of 10 wasn’t linked to worse mental health and suicide-related outcomes.
The debate around cellular phones and social press has focused on restricting or outlawing use, according to initial author Dr. Yunyu Xiao, associate professor of community health sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine.
According to clinical trials, restricting mobile phone use, for example during school hours, did not reduce the risk of suicidal behaviour or improve other aspects of mental health.
This investigation might represent a paradigm shift in how to address the effects of camera time on young people’s mental health.
Dr. Xiao said that testing treatments that work against other types of habit might be a good way to address this kind of social media and cellular phone use.
Top writer on this study is Dr. John Mann, the Paul Janssen Professor of Translational Neuroscience in Psychiatry and Radiology at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
Quantity versus value
Almost 4, 300 boys between the ages of nine and ten when they first started the study were tracked by the scientists over the course of four years. Individuals identified as Asian, Black, Hispanic, White, or Multiracial.
The researchers identified three addicted usage patterns for social media use, mobile phone use, and two for compulsive video game use using machine learning and data from member conversations. These trajectories, when compared to graphs, showed how addictive behaviors were.
By the age of 14, almost one in three participants had a high rate of social media addiction, and nearly one in four had mobile phones as well. More than 40 % of young people had a high rate of video game addiction.
These adolescents were significantly more likely to report suicidal behaviors or thoughts, as well as signs of anxiety, depression, aggression, or breaking rules.
Additionally, the researchers discovered that each type of digital activity had a distinct relationship to mental health symptoms and suicide-related behaviors. The high and growing addictive use patterns were linked to a two to three times higher risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors than the low addictive use patterns for social media and mobile phones.
Additionally, higher usage patterns were linked to either internalizing symptoms like anxiety and depression or externalizing ones like aggressiveness or inattentiveness.
Parents may want to pay closer attention to how their children are using their digital devices and look into having them tested for signs of addiction, according to co-first author Dr. Yuan Meng, postdoctoral associate in population health sciences at Weill Cornell.
” If an addiction is identified, restricting use of mobile phones and social media for a portion of the day may potentially reinforce addictive behaviors, so seeking professional advice is essential.”
Paradigm Shift
This study demonstrated that future suicide-related or mental health outcomes were not related to total time spent on social media, mobile phones, and video games.
What was most important was how young people were using screens, particularly if they used them when they displayed signs of compulsion, distress, or loss of control.
The findings suggest that it might be worthwhile to evaluate social media and mobile phone usage patterns in children as they get older to become adults in order to develop addictive habits.
Children who initially exhibit low or moderate trajectories are not typically regarded as at-risk, but follow-up can identify worrying trends like the development of more severe addictive use over time, according to Dr. Xiao.
Although the study does not demonstrate that addictive screen use leads to mental health issues, it is believed that these teenagers are at least twice as likely to engage in suicidal behavior in the near future.
This calls for further investigation and evaluation of methods that have worked for other addictions in children and adolescents for this issue, according to Dr. Mann.
Next, Dr. Xiao and her team intend to use their demographic and socioeconomic information to create profiles of children who move through various trajectories. The researchers are also developing strategies to combat addictive behavior at the onset in order to lower the risk of suicide.
Dr. Katherine M. Keyes, professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and Dr. Timothy T. Brown, associate director for research at the Berkeley Center for Health Technology at the University of California, Berkeley, also contributed to this study.
About this news from research into neurodevelopment and mental health
Author: Barbara Prempeh
Source: Weill Cornell University
Contact: Barbara Prempeh – Weill Cornell University
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Open access to original research
By Yunyu Xiao and al.,” Addictive Screen Use Trajectories and Suicide Behaviors, Suicide Ideation, and Mental Health in US Youths.” AMA
Abstract
Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Prevention, and Mental Health in US Youths: Addictive Screen Use Trajectories and Suicidal Behaviors, Suicidal Ideation, and Mental Health
Importance
Concerns about potential links to youth mental health problems have grown as a result of the increasing use of social media, video games, and mobile devices among young children. Prior research primarily focused on total screen time as opposed to longitudinal longitudinal addictive use patterns.
Objectives
To examine the correlations between addictive behavior on social media, mobile devices, and video games and their links to suicidal thoughts and mental health outcomes among youths.
Design, Setting, and Participants , ,
Consistent with population-based sampling from 21 US sites, the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study ( 2016-2022 ) analyzed data from baseline through the year 4 follow-up.
Exposures
Use of harmful social media, mobile devices, and video games is linked to inappropriate use of these devices through valid child-reported surveys from the years 2, 3, and 4 follow-up surveys.
Main Results and Measures  ,  ,
Use of child and parent-reported information from the Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia to evaluate suicidal thoughts and behaviors. The parent-reported Child Behavior Checklist was used to assess both internalizing and externalizing symptoms.
Results
The analytic sample ( n = 4285 ) had a mean age of 10.0 ( SD, 0.6 ) years, 47.9 % were female, and 9.9 % were Black, 19.4 % Hispanic, and 58.7 % White. 3 addictive use patterns for video games, 2 for social media, and 2 for mobile phones were found in the linear mixed models’ latent class.
Nearly one-third of participants, who were 11 years old, had an increasing habit of using social media or mobile devices as a result. In adjusted models, higher risk of suicide-related outcomes was related to increased addictive use trajectories ( for example, increasing addictive use of social media had a risk ratio of 2.14 [95 % CI, 1. 61-2.85] for suicidal behaviors ).
High levels of addictive use were associated with suicide-related outcomes across all screen types ( for example, high-peaking addictive use of social media had a risk ratio of 2.39 [95 % CI, 1. 66-3. 43] for suicidal behaviors ).
In contrast to low addictive use trajectories, the high video game addictive use trajectory showed the greatest relative difference between internalizing symptoms ( T score difference: 2.03; 95 % CI: 1.45-2.61 ); and the growing social media addictive use trajectory for externalizing symptoms ( T score difference: 1.05; 95 % CI: 0.54-1.56 ). At baseline, total screen time was unrelated to outcomes.
Conclusions and Relevance  , ,
Early adolescents were frequently associated with addictive behavior with social media, mobile devices, or video games. High and growing addictive screen use patterns were linked to suicidal thoughts, ideas, and worse mental health.
