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There’s one thing we know about mental health that applies to people of any age, from children to teenagers to full-grown adults: people who are actively engaged in life report high levels of life satisfaction and overall wellbeing. That’s not only true for their mental health, but also true for their physical health. For the purposes of this article, though, we’ll focus on mental health. What do we mean by
Online Predators Target Adolescent Males When we think of online predators – more accurately, when we think of the victims of online predators – we most often think of young women. We think of teenage girls. We imagine older men grooming vulnerable young women, luring them into compromising situations that can end in about a thousand bad ways, up to an including the worst possible outcomes – which we won’t
Stranger Danger in the 21st Century We published an article recently called “Guns, Suicide, and Teens,” in which we talk about a disturbing threat to teenagers – teenage boys in particular – known as “sextortion.” We realize that word sounds like made-up internet slang, but it’s not. It’s used in official press releases by serious government agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), so we know it’s real.
Is Texting While Driving a Warning Sign or Risk Factor for Addiction? There’s an interesting phenomenon in the field of mental health research that’s developed over the past fifteen years. We should clarify that. The phenomenon developed in a subfield of mental health research: addiction research. The subject of the phenomenon we’re talking about goes by several names. Here are the thee most common: Cell phone addiction Internet addiction Social
Researchers: FDA Warnings Associated With Decreases in Treatment Teen mental health is everywhere in the news right now. There’s one aspect of teen mental health dominating the headlines: the increase in teen suicide risk and suicide deaths. It’s not a new story. Between 2007 and 2018, teen suicide rates increased almost sixty percent. In 2014, suicide became the second leading cause of death for people age 10-24. Alongside these increases
News Headlines Highlight the Risks: We Examine the Evidence Over the past ten years, parents have worried that screen time and social media use are harmful to their children’s development. For parents who grew up without smartphones and the internet, it’s an easy position to take. The way kids, tweens, and teens spend their spare time now is quite different than the way a child of the 70s or 80s
A University of California – Los Angeles Study Says “Yes, They Can” When adults involved in the lives of teens talk about the relationship between television and mental health, their default starting position is often negative. This may derive from the fact that when most parents of teens were young, they heard their parents say things like “too much TV will rot your brain” and “you need to get out
If you’re the parent of a teenager in the year 2021, there’s a good chance you worry about the impact of social media on their mental health. You have good reason to worry. Media headlines over the past several years have presented a consistent message: social media is bad for our teens. Data from reputable sources – not just clickbait news-like sites – appears to support this message, too. Here
Experts Disagree on the Effect of Cell Phones on Adolescent Mental Health We recently published an article called Why Are Teens Lonelier and More Depressed? that discussed the state of mental health in our adolescent population as of 2021. Evidence from a wide variety of sources shows a marked deterioration in the overall mental health of our teen over the past twenty years. Key data points include the following: Suicide
Shortly after social media platforms entered the national spotlight about ten years ago, critics began warning us that excessive time scrolling, posting, liking, and commenting on posts would lead to negative mental health consequences. Over the past ten years, various studies have examined the effect of social media use on well-being, with mixed results. Some studies claim social media use is causally related to increased anxiety and depression. Some say
