Teenagers with anxiety or depression spend more time on social media, according to experts

Teenagers who live with anxiety or depression aren’t using social media platforms the same way as everyone else.

A survey of 3,340 adolescents shows that those diagnosed with mood disorders spend about fifty extra minutes per day online and feel less satisfied with their circle of digital friends.

“The link between social media use and youth mental health is hotly debated, but hardly any studies look at young people already struggling with clinical‑level mental health symptoms,” said Luisa Fassi of the University of Cambridge’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, lead author of the new analysis.

Social media use in teens

Screen‑time tallies have long dominated discussions, yet raw hours rarely capture how different minds behave online.

Fassi’s team compared adolescents with and without internalizing conditions, a clinical category that includes anxiety, depression and post‑traumatic stress, to tease out patterns that simple time logs miss.

The researchers used gold‑standard diagnostic interviews rather than symptom checklists, giving the work more clinical weight than most surveys.

Co‑author Dr Amy Orben noted that their approach “scratched only the surface” and called for richer data drawn directly from platforms, not just memory‑based questionnaires, to clarify what teens actually do online.

A separate Pew Research Center poll of 1,391 U.S. teens released this spring echoed the concern: forty‑five percent of teenagers say they spend too much time on social media, up nine points from 2022.

These self‑judgments hint that many young users already sense a mismatch between healthy habits and their own scrolling.

Time spent is just one clue

Numbers alone cannot capture who is at risk, because everyday usage varies widely.

A 2020 study that pinged Dutch adolescents six times a day found that forty‑six percent actually felt better after passive browsing, while ten percent felt worse, underscoring how effects shift from one teen to the next.

Cambridge’s work agrees that harm clusters in specific groups.

Teens with anxiety or depression were twice as likely as their peers to say they compare themselves with others online and to report mood swings tied to likes and comments.

Teens use social media for comparisons

Scrolling social media often invites online social comparison in teenagers, the tendency to measure one’s own worth against curated posts.

When the study team asked participants whether they judged themselves against others on social platforms, forty‑eight percent of anxious or depressed teens agreed, versus twenty‑four percent of teens without a diagnosis.

Such comparisons can erode self‑image during a developmental window when peer approval carries extra weight.

Clinical psychologists warn that upward comparisons, seeing only friends’ highlight reels, may intensify rumination in youths already prone to negative self‑talk.

Fassi’s group also saw a sharp dip in friendship satisfaction: young people with mood disorders were less happy with the size of their online networks, even though they spent more hours building them.

That mismatch can reinforce feelings of rejection and loneliness, two hallmarks of depressive thinking.

Likes, comments and mood swings

Social media feedback tools, especially visible like counts, amplify emotional highs and lows in teens’ lives.

About one in four teens with internalizing conditions said their mood rises or falls with social feedback, nearly double the rate seen in unaffected peers.

Losing control over time was another problem spot.

Respondents with anxiety or depression were more likely to report that they stayed online longer than intended, suggesting that compulsive use may act as both symptom and amplifier of distress.

Externalising disorders such as ADHD told a different story.

These teens logged more time overall but showed few other differences, hinting that impulse‑driven overuse is not always paired with negative feelings about online life.

What this means for families and policy

The findings help clinicians move beyond blanket screen‑time limits. Targeted guidance that tackles comparison habits, late‑night usage and the emotional weight placed on likes may benefit vulnerable teens more than universal caps.

Parents can start by keeping phones out of bedrooms, a step the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended for years.

Modeling intentional use, checking feeds at set times rather than reflexively, is another practical shift that shows adolescents how to set boundaries.

Policymakers, meanwhile, are weighing curfews, age‑verification rules and tighter controls on algorithmic feeds.

Orben cautions that regulation should be informed by rigorous evidence, not moral panic, because a minority of teens appear resilient or even happier online.

Teen social media use needs more study

Researchers do not yet know whether heavy social media use triggers anxiety or whether anxious teens seek refuge online.

Longitudinal data that track the same individuals over years, paired with direct platform logs, are needed to untangle cause from effect.

Future studies must also include marginalized groups and conditions like eating disorders, which were too rare in the Cambridge dataset to analyze.

Only by mapping diverse experiences can science inform design changes that protect every young user, not just the average one.

The study is published in Nature Human Behaviour.

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