UFS "Education for the Future": Social media use and adolescent mental health in clinical and non-clinical populations

Mental health conditions affect approximately one in seven young people worldwide, while social media has become embedded in adolescents’ everyday lives. Understanding how these intersect — particularly for the growing number of young people with mental health conditions— is therefore of clinical and societal importance. Yet, existing evidence remains fragmented and inconclusive. In this talk, I will present findings from three complementary studies that address key gaps in the literature. First, I will report results from a systematic review and meta-analysis synthesising 15 years of research on the association between social media use and internalising symptoms across community and clinical samples, highlighting limitations in study populations, measurement, and design. Second, I will present findings from a registered report using a nationally representative UK survey to examine differences in social media use between adolescents with and without mental health conditions, drawing on diagnoses derived from multi-informant clinical interviews rather than questionnaires. Finally, I will introduce a novel outpatient-clinic study linking adolescents’ real-world TikTok and Instagram data with mental health and cognitive assessments, outlining the study protocol and sharing early results. Together, these studies illustrate how integrating evidence synthesis, clinical diagnostic data, and real-world digital trace data can advance understanding and inform more effective responses.

Register at: umfragenup.uni-potsdam.de/educationforthefuture_webinar/

The Zoom link will be sent to all registered participants the day before the event.