Since mid-September, a few weeks before the world day dedicated to mental health awareness celebrated on 10 October, the media around the world have thought about dealing with it. After almost two years of pandemic in which the difficulties have worsened for those who were already invisible to society and during which the shared experience of exposure to risks and uncertainties made it legitimate to talk about psychological suffering and ask for help that remains unequal and not very accessible in the national health system, the usual tones and arguments for talking about mental health have been recovered. After almost two years in which alarmism in the press and TV has contributed to spreading fears and making the social cohesion that leads to responsible behavior more complicated, the only way considered appropriate to talk about mental health has still been to create panic around social networks.
This time the idea was offered by Facebook, through an internal relationship that arrived with an unjustified clamor on the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the denunciation of a whistleblower – Frances Haugen – confirmed in a hearing in the United States Senate, which revealed, in general terms, the prevalence in the company of private interests over public ones and risks for users.
Now, it also seemed to me a clumsy attempt by the general media to recover as supporters of those courageous people who, risking their profession and in some cases their lives, reveal with extensive documentation illicit acts, fraud, crimes committed by institutions of power. If it happens in the scientific world, at least the whistleblower or whistleblower plays his career and in any case must expect a certain number of subpoenas in court that require long-term procedural procedures, with the sole purpose of annihilation, in the absence of support even financial from the community. If it happens in the palaces of power, the risk is to incur an immediate or slow death, depending on the messages you want to send to other people intent on reporting abuse. These whistleblowers usually do not deal with the dominant newspapers, except to discredit them.
The internal report and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen denounced the mental health risks to which mostly teenagers are exposed on Instagram.
The revelation of the Wall Street Journal is problematic in itself, because it relies on a presentation that extrapolates data of dubious scientific validity, since they are based on self-reported measures of the time spent online and of one’s psychological state (self-assessment questionnaires including questions such as “In the last 30 days how much Did you feel sad? ”,“ How stressed did you feel at home or at school? ”,“ Was it difficult for you to manage your time on social media? ”, etc.) that the participating people completed online.
Studies have been based on these tools in the past and later denied that correlated the longer exposure time to digital devices with an increase in mental disorders in adolescents. These measures, on in-depth analysis, have shown a substantial discrepancy from objective measures of time spent online. For this, Douglas Perry of the South African University of Stellenbosch and collaborators recently warned researchers “that this discrepancy is also a strong signal of the limited construct validity of self-assessment measures of media use”. The authors add that “it is time for researchers to stop pretending that self-assessment tools are accurate indicators of actual behavior” and, depending on the aspects they want to study, take into account tools of recognized validity.
It is no coincidence that the journalists of the Wall Street Journal have decided to listen to the opinions of the American psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge who have distinguished themselves in recent years to sow moral panic over the use of new technologies, using for their investigations exclusively self-assessment tools, non-transparent data, analysis artificial statistics.
At Facebook, they felt compelled to respond to the article of the WSJ, adding more details on internal research, in a larger picture that also demonstrates the positive effects of Instagram on younger people and substantially changes the conclusions. When the data are not transparent, it is possible to choose from time to time the part that best suits the opinion to prevail, as did the WSJ and how did Facebook. We do not know that the purposes for conducting this internal investigation were directed to prepare the launch of a social media for preteens or to defend themselves in legal proceedings against possible claims, what is certain is that the original results cannot be considered valid by the scientific and clinical point of view.
Another certain thing is that, with a few exceptions even in our newspapers, most journalists and commentators have once again demonstrated the inability to critically read the research, taking for granted the reliability of the results, probably because they were functional to confirm the category aversion to social media. In fact, the toxicity of Instagram is now cited by some as an established thing, without any repentance.
Some colleagues who deal with dismantling the moral panic artfully associated with social media, which has re-exploded in recent days, have referred to what has become known as the Brandolini Law: “Bullshit asymmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute a bullshit is an order of magnitude higher than that needed to produce it.”
The bullshit asimmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
– Alberto Brandolini (@ziobrando) January 11, 2013
We have experienced it repeatedly over these long months of the pandemic. In the case in question, a great effort was needed to counter the asymmetrical wave that was now prevailing in terms of impact and diffusion, making good use of the policies of blackout, prohibitions and limitations. It is impossible to cite all the articles and posts that have highlighted from different points of view the weakness of revelations considered improperly so sensational.
Candice Odgers, interviewed by Anya Kamenetz, said: “If you ask teenagers if they are addicted / harmed by social media or their phones, the vast majority say yes, but if you actually do the research using objective measures […] you find very little or no connection. “Based on his studies, Odgers showed that” at the population level, there was little evidence that access and use of digital technology is negatively associated with the well-being of young adolescents. ” reported in January 2020 on Blue Suitcase the comments by Candice Odgers and Amy Orben on the complexity of studying the psychological impact of new technologies. The two researchers recently received an $ 11 million grant (not from Facebook!) For a project aimed at improving digital technologies in children and adolescents.
This is one of the ways to go: to finance collaborative research that recruit large and representative groups of participants, that are conducted according to methods shared by the scientific community, that are transparent in the various phases of implementation and access to data and that provide indications on how digital technologies can be better adapted and used. The other way is to promote education campaigns on the use of social media (just as we teach how to face the dangers of offline life) and to raise awareness on mental health: if they have the same teenagers as protagonists they will be very effective. These are two long-known avenues, which tend to receive little support and clamor.
So, at present, the negative impact of social media on mental health is not proven at all. Most of the studies conducted so far have been based on self-assessment measures of the time spent on devices that have proved unreliable, on questions exclusively aimed at investigating the negative effects, on the exclusion of contextual factors, on the lack of transparency in the data, inaccessible to independent researchers for further statistical analysis, on undeclared conflicts of interest.
We cannot continue citing new technologies as triggers of mental disorders unless we intentionally want to perpetuate ignorance of the complexity of risk factors. For some it is convenient to think that limiting or banning online life serves to solve problems that are rooted in time and require structural changes even offline: easy and immediate consent (on social networks) is preferred, instilling fears, to actions for the promotion of mental health to be implemented at school, at work, in sport and in all contexts of everyday life.
Read also >> Osaka, Biles, Williams and the broken taboo of mental health: a disruptive message that goes beyond the world of sport
In short, just before the 2021 Mental Health Awareness Day, the traditional media showed that they had not changed inappropriate methods and language. The pretext of the revelations on Facebook will serve other purposes but in the meantime it has increased the confusion and shifted attention from the social, economic and cultural context that plays a crucial role in the onset of certain mental disorders, in the inaccessibility of treatments and in stigma. The language that continues to be used is particularly dangerous because irresponsible communication puts public health at risk, this is amply demonstrated by scientific research.
Read also >> How the media should report mental health news
On the occasion of the world day on mental health, an editorial from the magazine Lancet he recalled to prioritize social justice: “Social disparities are not only related to poor mental health, but also have a negative impact on already socially marginalized groups. Therefore, in the wrong set of social circumstances, everyone is vulnerable to mental health problems. But mental health is possible for everyone. We need a change in current strategies because they do not adequately address the connections and intersections between the different domains of social life that make good mental health impossible. This change requires a recalibration of our understanding of the importance of the social determinants of mental health ”. Mental health passes through social and economic assistance interventions, argue authors Soumitra Pathare, Rochelle Burgess and Pamela Collins.
How long will we continue to point the finger at new technologies, self-absolving and irresponsibly renouncing concrete actions for the promotion of mental health?
Preview photo by Rawpixel.com, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons