Yesterday, we released our latest Podcast, How Screens Trap Teens in Depression. It features Jean Twenge, PhD, a highly regarded psychologist and researcher known for her critical work on the impact of screen time on today’s youth. 

Our conversation explored the relationship between digital technology use, specifically social media and gaming, and teen mental health trends.

And most importantly, it debunks many myths around teens and mental health. I highly recommend listening to this 30-minute episode when you can. (And if you like to “podfast” as I do, and about 29% of all podcast listeners, then it will take you less than 30 minutes 😀.) 

I'm sharing in this blog a snippet of my conversation with Twenge related to boys, depression, and video gaming.

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You can listen to the full episode here: Apple Podcasts // Spotify // YouTube // Castbox // YouTube

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Excerpt from the episode:

Delaney: What have you found overall about gaming and mental health?

Jean: Well, in the big data sets that I've worked with, the heaviest gamers are not in good mental health. There's a big data set in the UK, and then the one that I work with in the US of teens. And those are nice because they're really huge sample sizes, and that's what you want for the data to be as reliable as possible.

Then, you're not getting anomalous results from small sample sizes, especially when you're breaking things down by how many hours you're gaming. If you're looking at the top 10 percent of the sample, who are the heaviest gamers, say, if you only have 200 people, then you get variation that could throw things off pretty quickly.

So it's nice to have these big data sets with thousands and thousands of teens. And yeah, there's still a link to depression and unhappiness for gaming. It's just in some data sets, especially those from a few years ago. That link is not as strong as it is for the same number of hours of social media use.

Delaney: It's the heavy users, five hours or more of gaming, that you really start to see the correlation.

Jean: In particular, it tends to be a fairly linear like dose-response curve, but yeah, the highest levels are the five hours a day and more. That's pretty much always when you see the worst outcomes.

Delaney: And I think one thing that gets lost in all of this, like we've been talking about, is boys' mental health worsening.

Jean: Yeah, and in some of the data sets, increases in depressive symptoms, unhappiness, and loneliness have been larger for girls and boys, but the NSDUH study for clinical level depression, it's doubled for boys.

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Questions to get the conversation started this week, with your group or family:

1. What do you think of the research findings that show a greater risk of boys reporting depression symptoms with more video gaming?
2. Are you surprised to hear that depression symptoms have doubled for boys since the influx of screen time?
3. Do you know the symptoms of depression? (Prolonged sadness and/or lack of motivation, along with things such as significant negative self-talk and irritability?)
4. Do we know any boys who might be struggling with symptoms of depression?

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