Teens with anxiety and depression spend more time on social media

Teenagers with mental–health conditions spend more time on social media than their peers — on average, 50 more minutes on a typical day. They are also more likely to be dissatisfied with aspects of the experience, such as their number of online friends, a survey of 3,340 adolescents in the United Kingdom has revealed.

The study, published today in Nature Human Behaviour¹, explores how teens with specific mental-health conditions use social media, finding that participants with disorders such as anxiety and depression are more vulnerable to negative online experiences than are those with conditions such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). “That is a question that very few studies have addressed, especially on such a large sample,” says study co-author Luisa Fassi, a specialist in young people’s mental health and social-media use at the University of Cambridge, UK.

The results are “a good warning to families that if your youth is vulnerable because of anxiety, a tendency to have depression or be low in mood, then social media is something that really needs to be carefully monitored”, says Anne Marie Albano, a clinical child and adolescent psychologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City.

Online behaviour

The researchers analysed data from a 2017 survey of 11- to 19-year-olds conducted by the UK National Health Service (NHS). Participants underwent an in-depth clinical assessment and were asked about their use of social-media sites and how they feel about them. Sixteen per cent of respondents had at least one mental-health condition. Of those, 8% had ‘internalizing’ conditions, such as depression and anxiety — characterized by negative emotions towards the self — and 3% had externalizing conditions, such as ADHD, characterized by negative emotions towards others.

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The analysis found that young people with mental–health conditions spent more time on social media overall, and those with internalizing conditions were more likely to compare themselves with others online than were those with externalizing conditions or no mental-health condition. Those with internalizing conditions were also more affected by comments or reactions to their posts and had less control over how much time they spent on platforms.