Youth Mental Health in the Digital Age: Canadian Youth Perspectives on the Relationship Between Digital Technology and Their Mental Health

ABSTRACT

New generations of youth are coming of age at a time when digital technology is omnipresent, and ever-evolving. It is not yet fully appreciated what effect this level of digital technology use will have on current and future generations. Although not entirely negative, dramatic shifts in human interaction and well-being have already presented themselves. Among these shifts are rising rates of youth struggling with mental health–especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we explore youth perspectives on the relationship between their digital technology and their mental health, through the use of semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis. Our research question was: How do youth understand the relationship between digital technology use and their mental health? We interviewed eight adolescents and asked them to share their experiences of the relationship between their devices and their well-being. Thematic findings highlight a conflictual relationship between digital technology use and youth mental health, affecting their relationships with others, themselves, and the world around them. Because digital technology consumption on this scale is so new, our sample represents one of the first available cohorts of youth to actively participate in the exploration of this topic. Implications include the need for further qualitative research to prioritize youth voices in ways that will benefit broader societal understandings of technology and mental health.

KEYWORDS:

• youth mental health
• digital technology
• social media
• qualitative research
• COVID-19

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Citation diversity statement

In the pursuit of intellectual and social diversity in academic scholarship, the authors of this paper acknowledge the academic community has historically underrepresented scholars from diverse backgrounds, including those from marginalized racial, ethnic, gender, and cultural groups. We also recognize the profound impact citations have on shaping the landscape of ideas and knowledge within our field. To this end, we strived to incorporate a multiplicity of voices into our work to enrich the quality and depth of our research whilst taking steps to promote a more inclusive and equitable scholarly environment. To assess the diversity of our references, we obtained the predicted gender of the first and last author of each reference by using a database that stores the probability of a first name being carried by a woman (gender-api.com). Using this measure and removing self-citations, our references contain 19.12% woman(first)/woman(last), 10.29% man/woman, 42.65% woman/man, and 27.94% man/man. This method is limited in that a) names, pronouns, and social media profiles used to construct the database may not, in every case, be indicative of gender identity and b) it cannot account for intersex, non-binary, or transgender people. We look forward to future work that could help us to better understand how to support equitable practices in our field and beyond.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.