Michael Rich, an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Boston Children’s Hospital, cautioned against the impulse to look for binary answers to complex problems by drawing too-simple connections between social media and suicide, or video games and violence.Ĭhildren may use interactive media in problematic or dangerous ways because of underlying problems, or they may be particularly vulnerable to what they find on social media.
#Teen suicide band live series#
The study was accompanied by an editorial calling the role of social media use among adolescents “an urgent public health issue that merits further investigation.”Īnother study, just published in JAMA Psychiatry, showed a suicide bump among 10- to 19-year-olds (both boys and girls, but a larger increase in girls) at the time of the release of the Netflix series “13 Reasons Why” the study shows association, not causation, but raises the question of “media contagion” - that is, the possibility that the show and the intense discussion of it on social media may have led to some imitative behavior, and cites “the need for safer and more thoughtful portrayal of suicide in the media.”ĭr. In mid-May, a report in JAMA looked at suicide rates among those aged 10 to 19 over the period from 1975 to 2016 boys have traditionally had higher suicide rates, but the gap has narrowed as rates rose among adolescent girls, with the largest percentage increases among girls aged 10 to 14. I recently wrote about the question of whether the word “addiction” is helpful in understanding our worries about adolescents and their relationships to the devices that connect them to their friends and their world.
There has been a lot of worry about adolescents and social media over the past couple of weeks, with new studies and reports raising questions about mental health and vulnerability, sleep and suicide.
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