The idea of a “digital detox” makes my eyes roll so far back I see memories from a past life as concubine number 6. When will we come to terms with our own desires and, rather than banning something we fear altogether, try to understand it? Whether booze or sugar or Celebrity Big Brother, there is a more adult way of dealing with something we feel has a hold over us than writing it off completely.
You see the fear most clearly in the eyes of a parent scrolling through their child’s Instagram. The Blair Witch Project had nothing on this, the sight of 17 comments under Grace’s selfie, all variations on the emoji for “hot”. The typical reaction? Burn it. Burn the phone, burn the internet, run now and run far. Pacing, Googling while chewing nicotine gum, “Do they have Snapchat in Devon?” Backspace, “Seoul?”
Which seems to be the general reaction to a new study confirming a rise in mental health problems among teenagers in the UK. It’s bad; it’s what we knew. The Department of Education spoke to 30,000 14- and 15-year-olds and found things are getting worse for girls. Out of those surveyed, 37% had three or more symptoms of psychological distress (for example, feeling worthless) compared to 15% of boys. More than one in three teen girls suffers from anxiety or depression. This rise of 10% in 10 years has led experts to call it a “slow-growing epidemic”. The news itself is depressing and distressing; the snap response has been to blame social media.
Once, young people ran around in fields, barefoot, laughing at the dying sun. Unhappiness was invented with Myspace in 2003, a belated millennium bug, and ever since adults have been staring suspiciously at screens, waiting for the next explosion. Except the problem is not the screen – like all shiny things, they simply show reflections.
In a memorable podcast, Ira Glass talked to a group of girls about their lives online, unpicking the machinations of their Instagram feeds as they watched the comments under their selfies roll in. What he concluded was that the only difference between what these 14-year-olds are doing and what humans everywhere have always done, is that their statuses are transparent, and noisy, and constantly updating. “It’s like I’m a brand,” said 13-year-old Julia, both its director and product. “To stay relevant…” Her friend Jane finishes her sentence “…you have to work hard.”
Responding to the study, Nick Harrop, campaigns manager of YoungMinds charity, said social media “puts pressure on girls to live their lives in the public domain, to present a personal ‘brand’ from a young age, and to seek reassurance in the form of likes and shares.” But that pressure, for a person to be a brand, doesn’t come from social media. It comes from believing that your image is the only thing you can control and that, when careers and security feel like fairytales, individualism is the only way to succeed. These problems don’t disappear when you sign out of Instagram.
Being offline doesn’t keep you safe, or protect you from anxiety, or make you a better person. If you have a mind that tends to spiral, and the internet enables that unrest, then while long walks without a phone will help, the phone itself is not to blame. As guilty adults we move quickly to hide the things that scare us, never more so than when they relate to children. But to blame social media for this “epidemic” is both to conveniently ignore the more difficult solutions – a fight for an education system that recognises the importance of non-academic subjects, an effort to improve our relationship with food and bodies so they don’t infect others, a campaign for a country that offers even a teaspoon of hope – and to place the pressure back on the young people. To say social media is to blame for young people’s anxiety issues is to suggest that the responsibility to get better is theirs. That if they simply remove themselves from social media they will be cured.
There are ways to navigate and change the businesses that provide platforms on which many of us live, without condemning them forever. There are ways to prevent things getting even worse for girls, but it will take more than smashing screens.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
