“When it comes to treating anxiety in children and teens, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook are the bane of therapists’ work.”
“With (social media), it’s all about the self-image — who’s ‘liking’ them, who’s watching them, who clicked on their picture,” said Marco Grados, associate professor of psychiatry and clinical director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital. “Everything can turn into something negative … [K]ids are exposed to that day after day, and it’s not good for them.”
[…]
“The data on anxiety among 18- and 19-year-olds is even starker. Since 1985, the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA has been asking incoming college freshmen if they “felt overwhelmed” by all they had to do. The first year, 18 percent replied yes. By 2000, that climbed to 28 percent. By 2016, to nearly 41 percent.”
“The same pattern is clear when comparing modern-day teens to those of their grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ era. One of the oldest surveys in assessing personality traits and psychopathology is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, which dates to the Great Depression and remains in use today. When Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, looked at the MMPI responses from more than 77,500 high school and college students over the decades, she found that five times as many students in 2007 “surpassed thresholds” in more than one mental health category than they did in 1938. Anxiety and depression were six times more common.”
WAPO: Why kids and teens may face far more anxiety these days
I don’t want to force a correlation here if it does not exist, but is there a potential connection?:
