Paper Topic Ideas

Is Social Media Responsible for the Rise in Teen Mental Illness?

In a follow-up to their 2023 warning about the dangers of social media for teen mental health, the American Psychological Association (APA) recently came out with a report on the aspects of social media that might be particularly harmful to young people. The book The Anxious Generation was also recently published and argues that social media is a main cause of the rise in teen mental illness. As a child of the 80s who lived through things like the Satanic Panic, I tend to be skeptical of moral panics, especially when one thing is blamed for what appears to be a large and complex problem. This is a really interesting topic to explore with an open mind because, behind all the hype, the evidence is not actually as conclusive as the media portrays.

Does social media cause teen depression or anxiety?

If you’re looking for articles or reports that raise concerns about the effect of ocial media on teen mental health, you won’t have problems finding them. The Surgeon General’s 2023 Social Media and Youth Mental Health Advisory describes a number of research studies that made connections between the amount of daily use of social media and negative mental health impacts. The NPR article “The truth about teens, social media and the mental health crisis,” describes tremendous changes since 2010 in how teenagers spend their time and interact with one another, how social media use is impacting teen sleep, and how "every indicator of mental health and psychological well-being has become more negative among teens and young adults since 2012." The article also describes a 2022 research study, “Social Media and Mental Health,” that looked at the rollout of Facebook across campuses and compared it to survey data on college students’ mental health from that period. Finally, the research study “Taking a One-Week Break from Social Media Improves Well-Being, Depression, and Anxiety: A Randomized Controlled Trial” found that asking people to stop using social media for a week led to lower self-reported depression and anxiety and higher reported well-being.

How has social media impacted bullying?

The Pew Research Center report on Teens and Cyberbullying surveyed students and found that 46% of teens have experienced harassment or bullying online. The report details types of bullying, gender and racial differences in bullying experiences, and teen victims’ perceptions of the response from those in positions of power. The scholarly article “Cyberbullying via social media and well-being” reviews existing studies on cyberbullying perpetrators, victims, features of social media that increase the likelihood of bullying, and the impact of bullying on well-being. And the fascinating New York Times article “What Students Are Saying About Bullying Today” features high school students talking about their experiences with bullying.

What impact has social media had on body image?

Adolescence is a time of heightened social comparison and social media is often used as a tool for teens to compare themselves to (often idealized) others. “Social media and body image: Recent trends and future directions” is a short scholarly article that summarizes the current research on social media and body image across different kinds of platforms and usage trends. Research suggests that photo-focused sites like Instagram have a significantly more negative impact on body image and that filters and image editing leads to decreased body image (“instagram face” anyone?). The New York Times has an excellent article, “What Students Are Saying About How Social Media Affects Their Body Image,” that captures the powerful stories of teens on how social media has impacted their self-esteem, for the worse and better.

But is it really that bad? Critiquing the evidence.

Unlike The Anxious Generation and many media reports, the APA’s report was much more measured in saying that “using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people” and focused on things that we know about developing adolescent brains that might make them particularly vulnerable to negative aspects of social media rather than saying that social media explicitly causes mental illness.

In “The Statistically Flawed Evidence That Social Media Is Causing the Teen Mental Health Crisis,” statistician Aaron Brown actually went through the research used by the author of The Anxious Generation and found that most of the studies were poorly designed and don’t actually show causation, just a weak association between teens with depression and anxiety and social media use. A recent book review in the journal Nature, “The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?” comes to similar conclusions.

In scientific and medical research, the systematic review is considered the highest form of evidence, because it reviews all of the existing research studies on a topic, examines the quality of the actual study and the strength of the conclusions, and then provides an overall conclusion on the topic. Many systematic reviews on this topic from the past few years reject the idea that there’s evidence that social media use causes mental illness in teens, critique the effect size in existing studies as “weak,” and raise concerns about the methodologies used in most studies.

Can social media ever be good for teens?

Another thing that often is left out in discussions on social media is that it can also be beneficial, especially for members of certain populations. In the article “How Social Media May Benefit Teens’ Mental Health” a professor and social media researcher describes some of the potential benefits of social media including connectedness, creativity, civic engagement, social support, and a safe space for people from marginalized populations. On that last point, research has suggested that members of LGBTQ+, Black, and other underrepresented communities particularly benefit from the connections they build with other members of their community on social media. In 2022, Pew Research surveyed teens and found that amongst the harms, many teens perceive significant benefits in their use of social media. Their report, Connection, Creativity and Drama: Teen Life on Social Media in 2022, details those benefits.

Just because the evidence on the harms of social media isn’t conclusive doesn’t mean that social media can’t be harmful to young people or that the government and organizations shouldn’t be pressuring social media companies to enact protections for children and teens. But when experts and journalists start pointing to a single thing as the cause of something as complex as mental illness across a massive group of diverse individuals, it’s always worth digging deeper into the evidence.

Tips for Finding Sources on this Topic

If you decide to research teens, mental health, and social media, these tips should help you find good sources.

If you’re able to use popular and scholarly sources for your research on social media and mental health, I’d recommend searching in:

• The library article search on the front page of the library website (be sure to select the Articles tab first!), which will find magazine, news, and scholarly (peer-reviewed) articles - Video tutorial on how to use the article search.
• U.S. Major Dailies, which is a database of articles from the country’s five largest newspapers.
• Free web searching will also be useful, especially for finding reports from the government, associations, and nonprofits, but be sure to look into the organization publishing the information to make sure it’s a respected organization, publisher, magazine, etc. If you’re looking for more info on how to evaluate sources, check out this video tutorial.

If you need to use only scholarly, peer-reviewed sources, I’d recommend searching in:

• PsycINFO - Video tutorial on how to use PsycINFO
• Google Scholar - Video tutorial on how to use Google Scholar

When you’re thinking about keywords to use, you may want to use more than just the term social media. Some authors may use the term social networking or social networks or may even focus on specific social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, etc. Authors might also use the terms adolescents or youth instead of teens. In addition to mental illness, you could use more specific terms like depression, anxiety, or eating disorder or you could use similar terms like mental health or mental disorders. You might also want to search on other aspects of social media that could impact mental health like bullying, cyberbullying, isolation, loneliness, body image, body dysmorphia, instagram face, etc. Or maybe look at positive aspects or benefits of social media like social connection, connectedness, social support, community, friendship, etc. Using keywords in different combinations can be useful to find a wider variety of sources.