Teens, screens, and suicide

A new study from JAMA and the Emmy-nominated documentary Social Studies, by Lauren Greenfield, highlight the link between social media addiction and suicidal ideation.

© Lauren Greenfield / Courtesy Fahey Klein Gallery

First, let’s begin with a mea culpa. Once upon a time, I bought my then eight-year-old an iPhone. (I know! I know! I’m sorry!) It was 2014. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, although I probably should have. Back then, I was a solo parent with three kids and no other family members living nearby, including the children’s father. My office was over an hour away by subway; my youngest’s after school program ended at 5 pm while my work day ended at 6:30 (why do we accept this?); and putting two older kids through college simultaneously had left me less-than-zero funds for childcare.

That iPhone, in other words, was a lifeline to my child and vice versa. It came in handy every day. I taught him how to use google maps to get where he needed to go. I showed him how to text me upon arrival at school, and then later when he’d arrive back home, or anytime he was hurt, sick, or didn’t feel safe. Like the time his classmates pushed his face into a metal playground structure and knocked out his permanent front tooth. He was bleeding so copiously that the principal of the school literally picked him up in her arms herself and ran with him to the nearest emergency dentist while asking him to dial the number on his phone labeled “Mommy.”

But what was lost for my son, in the name of convenience and emergency contingency, was the childhood his older siblings had, unmediated by a tiny screen. While they, born in 1995 and 1997 respectively, had the new Harry Potter book release, he had the latest update of Instagram. While they had empty hours to turn their blocks into a giant castle, he had all manner of dumb shit on his phone to scratch the itch of filling time. When Covid arrived, just prior to my son’s fourteenth birthday, he and the rest of his Gen-Z cohort plunged headfirst into their screens and social media, if only to stay connected during those crucial years of early adolescence. They all suffered from loneliness, psychosocial developmental delays, FOMO, and an inability to stay focused, but for some of his generation, the effects of this digital childhood were far worse: addiction, chronic depression, and even, in some instances, suicidal ideation.

Last month, JAMA published a study highlighting this link between teen screen addiction and suicidal ideation. Researcher Yunyu Xiao et. al. studied the mobile phone and screen use of 4285 US adolescents over the course of ten years, beginning when they were 9 and 10 years old, but with an important distinction from prior studies: they factored out overall screen time—which can include all kinds of useful and/or social activities such as reading the news and books, researching information, FaceTiming/calling/texting with friends, and writing—and honed in, instead, on the teens’ overall sense of addiction to their screens. In a nutshell, they found that it was this addiction to social media, mobile phones, and video games—not total hours of screen usage—that could predict a higher risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. They also found that, by age 14, nearly one third of the kids in their study had become increasingly addicted to social media; a quarter had become increasingly addicted to their mobile phones; and more than 40% showed signs of addiction to video games, leaving them at increased risk for suicide.

Immediately after reading this study, I contacted Lauren Greenfield, director of the multi-part documentary Social Studies (trailer below), which hones in, brilliantly, on many of the pitfalls and ills of a screen and social media-infected adolescence, including, in several of her subjects, suicidal thoughts and actions, which was the main thrust of episode five. Having watched her own younger son become dependent on his phone during Covid, she realized there was a story about teens and social media that had yet to be told. But how?

What Greenfield ultimately decided to do was genius: she hired a technologist to figure out a way that she and her crew could record, over the course of one year, not only the daily lives of her subjects but also the content being consumed and created on and by their mobile phones. In fact, to be a subject in her film, each student had to agree to this complete transparency. That way Greenfield was able, for example, to show how one of her subjects, Ellie, could sneak into an Uber at midnight to go meet her boyfriend across town while blatantly lying, in real time, to her sister and mother:

Greenfield would also periodically get together with her subjects for a group discussion over the course of that year, which she recorded at first just for background information. But then she realized that her subjects were finding value and comfort in leaving their phones at the door, meeting new friends, and sitting in a circle with other teens to simply chat and connect, unmediated, in real life. Or “IRL,” as they call it. These sessions became, in essence, the missing piece of their lives.

I ended up binging the entire series over the course of two days, then kicking myself for not watching it with my son, the one to whom I’d given a smart phone when he was 8, which both of us think was really stupid. (If you haven’t seen the show yet, consider watching it with your teenager or even tween, if you have one.) My own iPhone-generation kid is thankfully doing fine today, but all of us, including my older children and me, suffer from some form of phone addiction we have to work hard to curtail. (I recently downloaded an app called Be Present, which gamifies staying off your phone. It’s pretty great.) If I had to do it all over again, and I wanted to balance the convenience of having a phone with an understanding of their deliberately addictive and destructive ills, I’d get my kids one of the many “dumb phones” now on the market. In fact, all three of my children, now 30, 28, and 19, have said, at various times, that they would never give their own children fully functional smart phones until after they turn 16, if at all. Steve Jobs himself didn’t let his own kids use an iPad. He knew his company had created a form of digital crack.

I contacted Greenfield to discuss all of this. You can also watch her in a very funny interview on the Daily Show from last week here. Yesterday, Social Studies was nominated for an Emmy. I, for one, will be rooting for it to win.