My Turn: Digital disconnect and social media's impact on mental health – Concord Monitor

Published: 1/9/2022 9:00:59 AM Modified: 1/9/2022 9:00:08 AM In 2015, Sherry Turkle, a social scientist and licensed psychologist, wrote a bestseller, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power Of Talk In a Digital Age, about how in-person interactions are being replaced by devices such as smartphones.This book was released years after Facebook and other platforms began to not only replace conversations, but also to increase the amount of time people spend online.Smartphones have become such a huge part of our lives that even kids and adolescents have them. There is no question that these devices serve a purpose for emergency and safety reasons, but what is different is the addictive nature of smartphones, especially for children and young adults, as highlighted by the work of Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge.Both of these social psychologists have written about the growing use of digital devices and the mental health of adolescents. Increases they saw in loneliness, depression and suicidal tendencies prompted them to probe further. They uncovered that as the mental health of adolescents was declining, the majority of Americans were acquiring smartphones. They reported that by 2015 two-thirds of youth owned these devices and by 2019, depression had nearly doubled.But it was not just the increased ownership and…
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