Yesterday saw the publication of a report by the Royal College of Psychiatrists exploring children’s mental health in relation to their use of tech.
Whilst acknowledging the benefits, the report linked screen use to obesity, sleep problems and mental health issues like depression, self-harm and eating distress. Some young people, the report argued, are susceptible to compulsive use of networked technologies, their self-esteem linked to how others see them.
At 39, I’m someone who can remember life before networked technology. My school, college and university days weren’t played out on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. I got my first mobile phone at 17 and can still remember using it to make actual phone calls.
But life was not all rainbows and unicorns back then. As teenage girls of the 1990s, myself and my girlfriends felt tremendous amounts of pressure. In the decade of the ‘supermodel’, our role models were women like Kate Moss - skinny and silent. We aspired to these ideals, often to the detriment of our physical and mental health. Damaging messages about how we should look and behave reached us via newspapers, magazines, films and TV programmes. We went on diets. We calorie counted. We missed lunch. We spent our Saturday mornings in Topshop changing rooms, contorting ourselves into too-small jeans. We were always striving for success through conformity to unrealistic and unhealthy ideals.
It’s incredibly tempting to blame ‘social media’ or ‘tech’ wholly for the problems young people are experiencing today. However, by falling into this trap, we take our eye off the root causes of these issues. For me, there is one glaring continuity: neoliberal consumerism.
Neoliberal philosophy is replete with references to freedom and individuality. People ‘thrive’ and reap the rewards of their efforts as autonomous beings. You lost 10 pounds? Well done, hard work pays off! You are a success story, you determined individual.
However, you can’t be an individual if no one is there to witness it. What’s the point in losing 10 pounds if no one ever knows about it? That’s not really about uniqueness, diversity or autonomy at all. That’s about competitive conformity. Who can win? Who can be the best?
Twenty years ago, we all wanted to win. Neoliberal tropes of envy, hostile competition and success premised on the failure of others had very much taken root in our psyches.
In the twenty-first century however, the stakes are much higher. We are more visible. Pressure to succeed is greater because it’s now performed in front of a much bigger – and nastier - audience on social media. We take a risk when we post - of being criticised, bullied and demeaned - but post we do because the potential reward is so tantalising. As criminologist Steve Hall explains, ‘the terror of insignificance, of remaining unrecognised by others, might now reign supreme as the most potent and extractable source of human energy’[i].
As such, in this climate of narcissism, people cheat. They use filters, they’re selective about what they post. They present a polished version of themselves that they consider acceptable to put ‘out there’. They appear to be winning. But none of it is real.
It’s no wonder that young people are experiencing mental health problems. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that when children are presented with wholly unrealistic and unattainable symbols of ‘success’ that they feel confused and bewildered and anxious. Of course some will engage in self-harming behaviour as they attempt to quieten the noise of expectation. They can’t control what others are saying about them but they can control what they’re doing to their own bodies. Sometimes they feel that this is the only thing they can control.
In the social media age, even when we start to feel like we’re winning, our initial feelings of satisfaction don’t last long.
You lost 10 pounds – well now you can go buy new clothes! Treat yo’self! But wait a minute, look on your feed. Person B still looks better than you. Person C clearly works harder at the gym, look, you can see her abs. How many likes did your ‘before and after’ comparison picture get on Instagram? Not as many as that person. Who has the most views, the most retweets? Not you, clearly, must do better.
In the neoliberal rat race, we have always wanted to win and that winning has long been premised on the failure of others.
Social media has certainly poured more fuel on the fire, but it didn’t light the match.
If we are to tackle the mental health crisis in our younger generation, we need to look beyond their screens. We need to ask why we allowed these screens into our lives in the first place? How did we arrive at a point where this tech seeped from our offices into our homes, cars, bedrooms, dining rooms? Why did we need these distorted windows on the world?
Because our political economic system thrives on us never feeling good enough, as Winlow and Hall[ii] explain,
Consumerism exacerbates and plays upon the constituent lack that lies at the heart of the human subject. It has intruded into the internal life of the subject and creates a cultural climate of anxiety and competition, we become oriented toward hedonism and excess and seek to separate ourselves from our communities by raising ourselves above them.
The report I mentioned at the beginning of this blogpost made several recommendations. This included guidance aimed at parents about how much screen time they should allow children to have. It also included a call for technology firms to disclose data about how children are using their services and devices. Those are all important things to do. But ultimately, it’s our culture of winning, impossible expectations and ‘not enough stuff’ that we must challenge.
We need to champion the ordinary and the everyday - as Catherine Grey argues in her latest book. Rather than trying to be outstanding, why can’t we settle for just okay?
We can’t change our neoliberal consumerist political economy – well not overnight anyway – but we can be careful about the kinds of behaviour we’re modelling for the young people in our lives. We can stop reinforcing the idea that our happiness is conditional on consumer items and experiences. We can banish sentences that start with “I’ll be happy when…”. We can stop berating our bodies / clothes / jobs and saying mean things about celebrities in front of children. We can begin to learn to be happy now, valuing what we already have and who we already are and not making that happiness contingent on someone else being miserable.
Screens aren’t going to go away but in challenging the principles that gave rise to them in the first place, they might become less pivotal in the value that young people attach to themselves and others.
[i] Hall, S. (2012). Theorising Crime and Deviance. London: Sage.
[ii] Winlow, S. and Hall, S. (2017). Criminology and Consumerism. In: Carlen, P. and Franca, L. A. (eds) Alternative Criminologies. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 116-133.