Young people with a diagnosable mental health condition report differences in their experiences of social media compared to those without a condition, including greater dissatisfaction with online friend counts and more time spent on social media sites.
This is according to a new study led by the University of Cambridge, which suggests that adolescents with "internalising" conditions such as anxiety and depression report feeling particularly affected by social media.
Young people with these conditions are more likely to report comparing themselves to others on social media, feeling a lack of self-control over time spent on the platforms, as well as changes in mood due to the likes and comments received.
Researchers found that adolescents with any mental health condition report spending more time on social media than those without a mental health condition, amounting to an average of roughly 50 minutes extra on a typical day.*
The study, led by Cambridge's Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (MRC CBU), analysed data from a survey of 3,340 adolescents in the UK aged between 11 and 19 years old, conducted by NHS Digital in 2017.**
It is one of the first studies on social media use among adolescents to utilise multi-informant clinical assessments of mental health. These were produced by professional clinical raters interviewing young people, along with their parents and teachers in some cases.***
"The link between social media use and youth mental health is hotly debated, but hardly any studies look at young people already struggling with clinical-level mental health symptoms," said Luisa Fassi, a researcher at Cambridge's MRC CBU and lead author of the study, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
"Our study doesn't establish a causal link, but it does show that young people with mental health conditions use social media differently than young people without a condition.
"This could be because mental health conditions shape the way adolescents interact with online platforms, or perhaps social media use contributes to their symptoms. At this stage, we can't say which comes first – only that these differences exist," Fassi said.
The researchers developed high benchmarks for the study based on existing research into sleep, physical activity and mental health. Only findings with comparable levels of association to how sleep and exercise differ between people with and without mental health conditions were deemed significant.
