A child psychiatrist who spends his days treating children with mental health problems says we’re blaming the wrong thing. In a New York Times In his opinion piece, Dr. Jonathan Slater of Columbia University argues that national panic over children’s screen time is distracting from a much more fundamental failure: The country is not providing enough mental health care for children, nor the insurance coverage to pay for it. The real danger, he writes, lies not in the hours spent on devices, but in the addictive and compulsive use, especially of social media, which tends to appear in children already struggling with problems like depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism, trauma or family addiction. “Compulsive use is usually a sign of something deeper… which can both fuel screen use and, in turn, feed off it,” he writes.
Slater points to research, including extensive JAMA study, which found that total screen hours at ages 9 and 10 did not predict later depression or suicidal thoughts, while compulsive use did. Meanwhile, schools — the primary providers of mental health care for children — are underfunded and understaffed, and a major federal program to put more clinicians in schools has been eliminated. Rather than imposing blanket deadlines, Slater says, policymakers should expand evidence-based treatment and force insurers to cover it. “Blaming screens is a convenient way to avoid harder, deeper problems: inadequate mental health care and a system that chronically underfunds treatment,” he notes. For his full argument, read the entire article here.
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