Rates of mental health problems in teenagers have risen astronomically with the advent of the smartphone, but the problem is not being recognized or remedied. Bryan Hubbard reports
We should be worried about our teenagers. Mental health problems such as depression, anxiety and behavioral issues are rife in the age group, affecting one in seven teenagers aged 10–19. Most cases go undiagnosed and untreated, and tragically suicide is the third major cause of death among the young.
Rates of mental health problems in teenagers have increased 40 percent in the last 10 years alone although levels had been stable throughout the previous century. Some have blamed the sudden rise on the forced social isolation of Covid lockdowns, and this may have exacerbated the problem, but mounting evidence points to the overuse of smartphones, and scientists are beginning to agree.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes it as a “rewiring of the teenage brain” that began around 2015, when the smartphone and its front-facing camera began to be standard issue for teens. Girls are especially vulnerable to the mental health problems the phones create.
But they can’t break the habit because their friends are also on social media, which has become the only way adolescents communicate and “play,” he argues in his book The Anxious Generation (Penguin, 2024).
Haidt cites four classes of harm that smartphones create: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction. “Children need a lot of time to play with each other, face to face, to foster social development,” he says.
Community play started to decline in the 1990s as anxious parents, worried about imagined threats in the neighborhood, kept their children indoors. But the decline accelerated dramatically with the arrival of cell phones and then smartphones.
The average American teenager spends about five hours a day on a smartphone,1 way beyond the three-hour safety threshold determined by researchers from Johns Hopkins. They analyzed social media usage among 6,595 adolescents aged 12–15 and estimated that excessive usage heightened the risk of mental health problems.
Internalizing problems, such as depression and anxiety, are mental health problems that are turned inward, and externalizing behaviors, such as impulsivity, defiance and aggression, are turned outward, toward others.
Internalizing problems increased with just 30 minutes daily on social media, but the risk more than doubled with over three hours spent on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Tumblr.2 And youth were more than twice as likely to have both types of problems when they spent over 30 minutes a day on social media. The phenomenon has created a neologism: problematic smartphone use (PSU).
Researchers at King’s College London have defined PSU as “a pattern of behaviors, thoughts and feelings linked to smartphones that resembles an addiction, such as feeling panicky or upset when the phone is unavailable, finding it difficult to control the amount of time spent on the phone . . . and using the phone to the detriment of other enjoyable or meaningful activities.”
Nearly 19 percent of teens aged 16–18 and 15 percent of those aged 13–16 have said they suffer from PSU, which doubles their risk of anxiety attacks, nearly triples their chances of depression and increases their risk of insomnia, researchers from the college’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience discovered.3
The one bright light was that around two-thirds of the teenagers in the study recognized their addiction and wanted to spend less time on their phones. Around 16 percent said they needed support and advice to reduce their use, and those who said they had PSU were five times more likely to say they wanted help. Nearly 90 percent said they had tried at least one strategy to reduce their phone time, such as using the silent setting or turning off notifications.
Social media platforms deliberately make their services addictive, as data scientist Frances Haugen discovered in 2021 when she revealed that Facebook and Instagram knew they were directing young users toward harmful content, including material that promoted anorexia, and were targeting children under age 13.
One internal study from Facebook’s parent company, Meta, found 14 percent of teenage girls said that when they used Instagram, their suicidal thoughts intensified. And 17 percent reported that it increased eating disorders.
But Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg maintains that, overall, social media is a force for good, uniting disparate groups. Haidt likens this argument to the approach adopted by the tobacco industry to counter evidence that their products were causing cancer.
“The companies had done little or no research on the mental health effects of their products on children and adolescents, and they shared no data with researchers studying the health effects. When faced with growing evidence that their products were harming young people, they mostly engaged in denial, obfuscation and public relations campaigns,” he says.
Without help, university students continue to suffer from phone addiction. A Turkish study of 804 university students found that excessive smartphone use caused depression and insomnia. About half of the students were using their phones for more than eight hours a day.4
Schools are beginning to recognize the problem. Last September, California became the 14th US state to pass a law that requires schools to limit, or even ban, the use of smartphones. Schools have until July 2026 to come up with a policy that needs to be renewed every five years.
California governor Gavin Newsom said, “We know that excessive smartphone use increases anxiety, depression and other mental health issues, and we have the power to intervene. This new law will help students focus on academics, social development and the world in front of them, and not on their screens, when they’re in school.”
The bill will affect 5.9 million school students in California, although those going to school in Los Angeles have had their phone use restricted since last June.
The UK is planning to follow suit. Although many schools in England are already observing government guidelines to restrict smartphones, Josh MacAlister, an MP and former teacher, wants to make it a legal requirement.
His Safer Phones Bill is due to be debated early next year, and it would force schools to be mobile-free zones. Children would need to be 16 before they could use a phone without their parents’ consent. “Countries around the world are now taking bold action and our children risk being left behind,” he said.
In the US, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wants to place a health warning sticker on all smartphones, similar to the labels on packs of cigarettes. In a health advisory he published last year, Dr Murthy argues it’s time for everyone to take “immediate action to protect kids now.”
“The bottom line is we do not have enough evidence to conclude that social media is, in fact, sufficiently safe for our kids. And that’s really important for parents to know,” he said.
It’s a strategy that has already been introduced in France, Israel, India and Russia, and France has also implemented public awareness programs to educate adults about the dangers of RF (radiofrequency) exposure to their children. The country has also banned smartphone advertising directed at children and the sale of phones targeted at the young.
The US government is trying to catch up. It has issued a notice about the “unprecedented youth mental health crisis” in the country and formed a task force on children’s online health and safety that would be required to identify the potential harms posed by spending time online.
Groups like the Environmental Health Trust in the US want to expand the discussion to include the potential health harms, including cancer, that EMFs (electromagnetic fields) from the phones and cell masts may be having on children. Its founder, Dr Devra Davis, was also an adviser to the Clinton administration.
She cites studies from Sweden showing that those who started using cell phones as teenagers had four to eight times more malignant glioma (brain or spinal cancer) as adults. There has also been a fourfold increase in colorectal cancers in under-40s in the US and other industrialized countries since 2010, which she thinks may be traceable to the habit of keeping a smartphone in the pocket. Rates of glioma and thyroid cancer in under-60s have also increased.
But because cancer can be slow to develop, it’s hard to draw a direct line back to EMFs from smartphones and masts, says Davis in her book Disconnected (New Voices Press, 2024). Industry groups have protected operators and manufacturers by issuing blanket denials of any harm the technology may be causing.
If the jury is still out on the potential psychological and physical harm resulting from smartphones and EMFs, it makes sense to adopt the “precautionary principle”—assuming there could be a danger until they’re proven safe.
Davis suggests three ways to reduce EMF exposure: Limit the time spent on cell phones, increase your distance from wireless devices and replace wireless technology with safer alternatives, such as wired landline or ethernet connections.
Parents could do more to encourage social activity for their children. Davis urges them to get more involved at their local schools and encourage the use of wired internet, something that has already happened in kindergartens in France.
In short, it’s time for everyone to get smart about smartphones.
Dr Davis is the main speaker at a meeting on November 9. The conference, Wireless Radiation: The Elephant in the Room, is being held at the Michael Hall Lecture Theatre in Forest Row, East Sussex, UK, starting at 12:30 p.m. Tickets are available from Eventbrite. Entry is £15.
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