The Link Between Digital Media Use and Mental Health Is Weak

Digital media is bad for mental health. Or is it?

Reviewed by Lybi Ma

Key points

• Many people believe that increased use of digital media is responsible for increased mental health problems.
• Many people believe that mental health levels worldwide have been declining due to digital media effects.
• New research finds no compelling evidence to suggest that average mental health is in decline.
• New research finds no compelling evidence that adoption of digital media is linked to decreased well-being.

The fast advent of digital technology in the past few decades has transformed many aspects of modern life. Along with the technology’s undeniable appeal and usefulness come grave concerns about its potential downsides.

New technologies, however useful, inevitably have downsides and liabilities, and they come with a cost and stressful adaptation demands. Thus, they always provoke fear and apprehension alongside excitement. New digital tech in particular gives rise to concerns because it is so powerful, addictive, and by now ubiquitous. Much has been written about the purported link between the adoption of new tech—particularly cell phones and social media—and the reportedly declining indices of mental health in the US and around the world.

The link appears intuitive to many. Reports of a growing mental health crisis, particularly among young people, have overlapped with a period of rapid digital media dissemination. The psychological pitfalls of new media use are readily apparent: media use takes time away from face-to-face socializing; it hinders sleep; the new digital media fosters unrealistic comparisons and pushes unattainable ideals of appearance and behavior; it often traffics in falsehoods, and is designed to facilitate compulsive use.

Yet as is usually the case in the realm of human-tech interface, the story is not simple. The data, it turns out, are not as clear as one may have assumed. Moreover, early work in this area has been hampered by measurement inadequacies, poor or skewed sampling, insufficient well-being outcome data, and myriad other issues. Consequentially, we are not currently well informed about the actual effects of digital media on mental health.

A recent (2023) paper by Matti Vuorre of Tilburg University and colleagues sought to fill this gap. Applying nuanced analytic techniques to large samples, the authors conducted two related studies that attempted to address the purported link between adoption rates of new media and worsening mental health indices.

The first study focused on psychological well-being. It analyzed self-reports of life satisfaction, positive experiences, and negative experiences from over two million individuals (aged 15 to 89) across 168 countries between the years 2005 and 2022. The authors looked to correlate these data with data of the countries’ per capita Internet users and mobile-broadband subscriptions to see whether Internet and mobile-broadband adoption predicted psychological well-being over that period.

Results revealed that while Internet use has increased steadily throughout, ”life satisfaction had remained relatively stable, whereas both negative and positive experiences had increased.” These results, the researchers concluded, “Do not offer convincing evidence for consistent or meaningfully large global changes in well-being during this period of global Internet-technology adoption, as would be expected—all else being equal—if the latter had broad negative consequences.”

Changes in Internet users “did not credibly predict any of the three well-being metrics: A 1 percent increase in per capita Internet users predicted small increases in life satisfaction, negative experiences, and positive experiences, for the average country, but the probabilities of direction did not exceed a traditional 95 percent threshold. We found that per capita Internet adoption was not a credible predictor of well-being.“

Further, the analysis showed that countries with greater average levels of Internet and mobile broadband adoption tended to report greater average levels of life satisfaction. The researchers acknowledge that this association is probably multi-determined, and causality cannot be readily inferred. For example, a nation's socioeconomic status may affect both Internet adoption and life satisfaction.

Explored by country, the authors found mixed patterns regarding the link between Internet adoption and measures of well-being, with some countries showing positive, negative, or no relations. They conclude that this heterogeneity and lack of consistent associations across countries should qualify any inferences concerning associations for the average country and is further evidence against the idea that the adoption of Internet or mobile broadband has had uniform global negative effects on well-being.

Further analyses by age and sex produced similar mixed results. “Overall, these demography-specific trends and associations indicated no clear patterns specific to a particular demographic group." The researchers added that neither did they support the commonly offered narrative that young individuals, particularly young women, have experienced disproportionately large decrements in well-being in association with the adoption of Internet technologies.

The second study focused on mental health. Instead of relying on self-reports, the authors used meta-analytic data on rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm from 2000 to 2019 in 202 countries and analyzed their links to rates of Internet technology adoption. Results showed that the rate of change regarding mental health status was minimal. The authors reported no credible associations between Internet adoption and either anxiety, depression, or self-harm. Likewise, per capita mobile broadband subscriptions were not credible predictors of either anxiety, depression, or self-harm. They write: "These results suggested that all else being equal, country-level (mobile) Internet adoption does not predict mental health.”

Looking at between-countries associations linking Internet technology adoption with mental health, the authors found that countries with greater levels of per capita Internet users, on average, tended to be those with lower levels of depression and higher levels of self-harm. Likewise, per capita mobile-broadband subscriptions predicted lower rates of both anxiety and depression but higher rates of self-harm. However, "all of these between-countries associations were within the region of practical equivalence to zero.”

Again here, analyses by age and sex failed to produce meaningful results. Analyses of country-specific associations failed to find a meaningful link between (mobile) Internet penetration and fluctuations in countries’ mental health. The authors note the limitations of their studies, chief among them is their reliance on correlational analysis, which precludes causal inferences.

The fact that tech adoption rates did not predict mental health outcomes cannot be taken to mean that tech adoption does not cause mental health problems. This is because other extraneous, confounding factors may obscure or dilute the potentially existing link. Moreover, framing the media-health link in dose-response terms may be missing important nuances in people's relationships with media. For example, research has shown that while routine use is associated with positive health outcomes, emotional connection to social media use is associated with negative mental health outcomes.

More experimental and longitudinal studies are needed to ascertain whether a causal link exists, how powerful it may be, and under what conditions. For now, the authors summarize: “Our results suggested only small if any, average changes in mental health globally and no associations between mental health and Internet-technology adoption.”