Child and Adolescent Mental Health最新文献

In this article, we examine Australia's landmark decision to ban social media access for children under the age of 16, set to take effect in December 2025. While the legislation aims to protect young people from the harms of social media, including its impact on mental health and wellbeing, the evidence base underpinning the ban remains inconclusive, with most studies unable to establish causality. Drawing on parallels with adolescent alcohol prevention, we argue that prohibition alone is unlikely to be effective. Instead, we advocate for a harm minimisation approach that equips young people with digital literacy, resilience, and help-seeking skills. We highlight the essential roles of parents, schools, and adolescents in fostering safer social media use and call for inclusive, co-designed education initiatives.

Over recent years, there have been increasing societal, political and media concerns in relation to the ‘over-diagnosis’ and ‘self-diagnosis’ of common mental health conditions or emotional disorders, such as depression and anxiety. Using two large research projects as illustrative examples, we highlight that there is a mismatch between concern about ‘over-pathologising’ young people's mental health and the recognition and diagnosis of emotional mental health conditions in health and care settings. Concerns around labelling risks us losing a shared understanding and language around mental health and mental health care, within services, between sectors, and for young people and families.

Smartphones – used for accessing social media, gaming and peer interaction – account for the majority of screen time among children and adolescents, with many exceeding 5 h of daily use. Despite growing concern over negative impacts, action to safeguard our children from the potentially damaging effects has been slow, with concern dismissed as ‘moral panic’ in the absence of definitive causal evidence. Obtaining causal evidence is fraught with methodological challenges, exemplified by Lai and colleagues' timely synthesis of school-based interventions to reduce screen time. Such approaches (e.g. self-guided strategies/educational interventions) provide limited evidence of behaviour change and, unsurprisingly, effects rarely transfer to critical outcomes such as well-being and academic performance. Alongside gathering robust theory-driven causal evidence that can lead to strategies for promoting healthy digital behaviours, these findings reinforce the need to draw on multiple strands of evidence to inform policy. A multi-sector approach – spanning education, health and home – co-designed with young people is essential to fostering a healthier digital future.

In response to the article by Bourgaize et al. (Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 2025) on academic collaborations with technology companies, we argue that we need to move beyond guidance for individual researchers; instead, there is an urgent need to develop a research infrastructure, to manage the risks of collaborating with corporations whose profits rely on the very products under investigation. Institutional transparency is essential as well as consideration of the wider ecosystem regarding conflicts of interest. Much can be learned from historical examples of ‘corporate playbook’ techniques, such as the gambling and tobacco industries. Specialist ethical oversight is urgently needed, which considers broader questions around commercial influence, and minimum open science standards should be mandated by research institutions, in order to preserve public trust in science. An overarching national center of expertise is needed to develop guidance, together with legislation to enforce data sharing for independent research. Lastly, we suggest detailed questions should be asked about who may have the most to lose and the most to gain from a collaboration; academics should equip themselves not just with digital literacy, but also with ‘industry literacy’ to navigate this complex relationship.

We respond to articles in the Child and Adolescent Mental Health journal about whether, and under what, conditions researchers should collaborate with digital companies. In particular, we discuss the challenges academics face to access and study platform data. Independent academic research in this area is crucial for identifying and combating any potential negative effects that platforms can have on individuals and societies. Past discussions on academic data access have focused on platform regulation and data governance. However, in this commentary, we argue that even if key stakeholders agree on a regulatory and governance model, platforms have strong incentives to not comply—or to comply only partially. We advocate for a more holistic strategy aiming at influencing regulation, public opinion, news media, diverse political groups and for building a robust oversight structure.

Diagnostic mental health nosologies and diagnosticians have expanded the definition of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a way that may be inflating prevalence rates and that risks downplaying resilience, minimizing adaptability, and compromising healthy development in children. In the context of over-diagnosing and over-pathologizing normal and common human experiences in response to distressing childhood events, we call for rethinking our approach to trauma and PTSD and changing our attitudes to include – in addition to the imperative to protect – ways that children can develop agency, self-efficacy, and strength in the face of negative life events.

Children and young people are subject to well-intentioned mental health research ‘for’ and ‘about’ them. The problem is that research is not value-free and carries certain subjective assumptions that shape how we view mental health and illness. Participatory research—which involves children and young people not just as the subjects of research, but as partners and collaborators in different stages of the research process—can be a mechanism through which we can counterbalance an unhelpful ‘over-pathologising’ research culture. Participatory research can help us retain strengths-based insights and focus on pathways to resilience and to flourishing, while developing interventions to address the psychosocial challenges that many children and young people experience.