There are many reasons why social media is best avoided during the summer. All those shots of people holidaying in sunny locations can be hard to take when you’re stuck in a rain-swept city. But while scrolling through feeds of friends having a #dreamholiday might be accompanied by mild feelings of envy for the post-millennials among us, for adolescents coming of age in this era of digital saturation, the repercussions can be more damaging. As more people communicate via sites such as Instagram and Snapchat, with their emphasis on physical appearance and the shared intimacies of friendship groups, the spectre of exclusion is magnified, and it gets especially bad during the holidays, when students are likely to be estranged from their peers yet still watching their activities from the sidelines.
“Over the last few years, children have been spending an average of six-and-a-half hours in front of a screen per day,” announced the Connected Kids survey undertaken by specialist research group Childwise, in 2015. The group no longer monitors cumulative screen times, as children are more likely to use multiple screens at once, but recent figures found that children spend an average of 2.9 hours on their mobile phones. A report published this year by The Royal Society for Public Health found that spending more than two hours a day on social networking sites increased the possibility of poor mental health and psychological distress among young people.
Conclusive evidence that our increased exposure to social media is a contributing factor to mental health issues is yet to appear. But our youths are becoming more miserable. The number of 16- to 24-year-olds experiencing mental health problems is increasing: a 2016 report by NHS Digital found that self-harm rates doubled among men, and trebled among women, in this age group, between 2007 and 2014. When your worth is measured by “likes”, is it any wonder?