Digital Quicksand: How Screen Addiction Fuels Mental Health Crisis

What happens when the soothing glow of screens becomes a dangerous escape hatch for our children's emotions? In this revealing episode, addiction interventionist Matt Brown tackles the increasingly alarming phenomenon of screen addiction sweeping through younger generations.

Drawing from groundbreaking research published in the Journal of American Medicine, Matt explores how digital dependency correlates with rising rates of depression, anxiety, and even suicidal ideation among adolescents. The findings are sobering: nearly 18% of youth in the study reported suicidal thoughts, with addiction to screens—not merely screen time—being the critical factor. Most troublingly, many children as young as ten report using devices "to forget about problems," mirroring the exact psychological patterns seen in substance addiction.

This conversation strikes particularly close to home as Matt candidly admits his own struggles with healthy technology boundaries. "I find myself using technology in unhealthy ways too," he confesses, highlighting the unique challenge parents face: how can we guide our children when we're fighting the same battle? Rather than offering simplistic solutions, Matt invites listeners into a thoughtful reflection on modeling healthier relationships with technology and creating family environments where digital devices enhance rather than replace human connection.

Whether you're a parent worried about your child's screen habits, an educator witnessing changing classroom dynamics, or someone questioning your own relationship with technology, this episode offers valuable perspective on one of modern life's most pervasive addictions. Subscribe to Party Wreckers, share your own strategies for healthy tech boundaries, and join the conversation about raising resilient kids in a digitally saturated world.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Party Wreckers Podcast
• 1:10 Intervention on Call Free Family Support
• 2:50 Screen Addiction: The Growing Problem
• 5:40 Research on Screen Addiction and Suicide
• 9:30 Escaping Problems Through Screens
• 14:20 Modeling Healthy Technology Use
• 17:30 Call for Feedback and Strategies

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Party Wreckers podcast, hosted by seasoned addiction interventionist, Matt Brown. This is a podcast for families or individuals with loved ones who are struggling with addiction or alcoholism. Perhaps they are reluctant to get the help that they need. We are here to educate and entertain you while removing the fear from the conversation. Stick with us and we will get you through it. Welcome the original party wrecker, Matt Brown.

Speaker 2: 0:45

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Party Wreckers podcast. My name is Matt Brown. I'm your host. I am an addiction interventionist. I work with families who have loved ones that struggle with addiction, who need professional help but are not going to be willing to choose that help for themselves. I'm so glad you found the podcast. I'm so glad you're here. If you've been here before, welcome back.

Speaker 2: 1:10

Before we jump into today's topic, let me just remind everybody that now, five nights a week, intervention on Call has free family Zoom calls where we support families who are going through what many of you are likely going through right now, and that is you have a loved one in active addiction and they're reluctant to get help. You're not quite sure how to have that conversation with them or move that conversation in a better direction, but you're also not quite sure what it might be like to talk to an interventionist and actually get some feedback in real time. And so we do this five nights a week. Now, monday through Thursday, it's 8 pm Eastern time, and then on Sundays we do a special West Coast call at 8 pm Pacific time. We want there to be a place where families in crisis can come have a conversation with an interventionist where we're going to give you real-time feedback On these calls. We are not trying to upsell you anything. We are trying to answer questions. We are trying to provide you with strategies, with language, with ideas on how to move your situation forward so that you actually don't need to have somebody like me come into your living room and do an intervention with your loved one. Sometimes that's necessary, but I don't ever want that to be the first conversation that we're having. And so now, five nights a week, we do this for free for families. If you're interested in being a part of those Zoom calls, you register at interventiononcallcom. Thank you for that.

Speaker 2: 2:50

Now on to today's topic. This is a little bit of a different I don't want to say spin, but I'm going to take. We're talking about every kind of addiction today, if that's the right way to phrase this. It's something that has been increasingly more on my radar, both in my private practice as an interventionist and in talking with families, and it's affecting younger and younger individuals. Basically, the earlier somebody gets a cell phone, the earlier this problem starts, and that we're talking about screen addiction. This has been something that I've actually gone and traveled and done in-person interventions for people struggling with screen addiction or technology addiction, and we're talking about social media, we're talking about gaming. While that includes phones and mobile devices, we're also talking about gaming systems and just time spent on screens as a whole.

Speaker 2: 3:53

And it's hard because this is more one of those process addictions almost like an eating disorder or workaholism or something like that where you almost can't function in today's society without a screen, but at the same time it can become a problem. And it's also becoming a problem more and more for the younger generations, and so as they get phones and devices put in their hands earlier and earlier, the problem starts. I mean all of my kids. They don't carry textbooks around anymore. The schools issue them an iPad at the beginning of the school year and that's where they do all of their work, and so, even from an educator standpoint, all of this is happening on a screen. And so, while technology has huge advantages and my kids when I tell them that iPads hadn't been invented when I was their age, that the internet hadn't been invented when I was their age, they can't imagine a life without that. And you know, here we are one generation later and they're completely dependent on it in many ways, as am I. You know I include myself in this. I use a phone and a tablet and a computer and all of those things, and I'm constantly on screens, both for entertainment and for work, and so it's a little bit of a tricky subject, I guess is what I'm saying.

Speaker 2: 5:18

But the study that I'm going to be referencing today was published in the Journal of American Medicine. It correlates not necessarily screen time with an increase in suicidal ideation and suicidal behaviors, but particularly addiction associated with screens and suicidal ideation and suicidal behavior. What the study found and let me say this from the outset is that the amount of screen time did not dictate an elevation in risk of suicide, that they did not determine what they were looking at, and they tracked about 4,000 young people from the time that they were about 10 or 12 years old until they were a little bit older. I think that this study went on for four or five years, if I remember correctly. They studied about 4,000 kids and they would periodically interview them to assess for you know, are you becoming addicted to social media, to screens? And here's what they said Assess, assessing them periodically for both their average daily screen time as well as for symptoms of addiction which allowed them to see how these addictive behaviors changed over time.

Speaker 2: 6:46

For addiction, you know, with substance use disorder, alcohol use disorder, there are specific questions that will indicate whether or not you actually meet criteria for substance use disorder or alcohol use disorder. They adapted those same questions to apply to social media and screens and gaming, and so some of the questions on the questionnaire were you know, true or false? I spend a lot of time thinking about social media apps or planning to use social media apps, true or false. I try to use social media apps less, but I can't True or false. I feel stressed and or upset if I'm not allowed to use my social media apps, True or false. I use it so much already. It has a bad effect on my schoolwork. Now some of these hit home a little bit for me because I can get caught doom scrolling when I got nothing else better to do, and I'm sure that there are plenty of people listening to this right now that may feel like they're in the same category.

Speaker 2: 7:44

You know, obviously, in the context of what we're talking about today, we're really focusing on young people, but I think this applies just as much to us and we need to kind of take this to heart. As we're talking about this today, I also want to make it clear and I guess I should say this from the outset is that you know if your kid has a phone, if your kid, you know, has an iPad, those kinds of things like that. I am not here to say you shouldn't be doing that. This is not a commentary on anybody's parenting practices. I want to be really, really clear on that, because my kids have phones and my kids have devices that they use for school. This is certainly something that hits home for me, and so let's just go from there and try to keep that part of what we ordinarily might judge. Let's just kind of keep it off the table.

Speaker 2: 8:36

So what they found as they began to ask these questions at different intervals throughout these young people's development from around 10 years old to 14 or 15 years old with social media, they found that almost 60% had low levels of addiction to social media and that stayed stable over the years. So about 60 percent had a low level addiction and that didn't change. That stayed at that low level for the duration of the study. About a tenth had an increasing addiction that peaked around year three or four of the study and a third showed increasing addiction throughout the entire study. So there were basically three different metrics that they saw, three different levels of addiction that they saw, the largest, of course, being a very low-level addiction that really didn't change over time. About a 10% sliver of the study had an increasing addiction that peaked at about three or four years and then 33% showed an increasing addiction throughout the entire. So from the time they were 10 to the time they were 15, the addiction continued to increase in strength over the course of those four or five years.

Speaker 2: 9:51

With mobile phone use, about half showed high addiction and a quarter had increasing addiction. So mobile phone use across the board, regardless of what they were doing with their mobile phones, whether they were texting or on social media or just mobile phone use altogether, they found that about half had high level addiction. So that same 33% that showed that increasing addiction over time about half of that. When they looked at just specifically mobile phone use, about half of the people in the study met criteria for the high level of addiction and a quarter had the increasing addiction. With video games, they found only two groups about 60%, showing low-level addiction that stayed stable over time and 41% that were highly addicted to it throughout the entire period. I know that's 101%. I'm not exactly sure how they arrived at those numbers, but about 41% said they were highly addicted to it throughout the entirety of the study. So here's where things get a little bit tricky and a little bit scary.

Speaker 2: 11:03

At year four of the study, nearly 18% reported having suicidal thoughts and 5% admitted to suicidal behaviors, which includes making suicide plans and attempts. That's higher than normal, and so when you look at a study of 4,000 people, 18% of them had suicidal thoughts, and this correlates to levels of depression and anxiety that we'll get into here in just a few minutes. About 18% had suicidal ideation. They thought about ending their lives. About 5% actually had attempts or plans when they started assessing for, okay, why do these devices have such a hold on the minds and the thoughts of young people?

Speaker 2: 11:59

And what they found is that these young people were using devices, games, social media in the same way that a lot of young people, and even people our age, my age use substances addictively as we get older. That these young people at 10 to 15 years old. One of the statements they got from the questionnaire was I play video games so that I can forget about my problems. That was kind of a common theme throughout social media use, phone or tablet use in general and video game use is that many, many, many of the of the people that were in in the study said that they used these devices to forget about their problems, and that's where this kind of all ties together. Is that, for those of us that become addicted, that's where the addiction really lives, in that I don't want to have to feel what I'm going to feel if I'm not using this to run away from the feelings, from the problems.

Speaker 2: 13:07

Avoidance is a key symptom of both anxiety and depression and depression. So as we start looking at how this is a mental health issue, that's really what we're talking about is that when we start getting into the behavior of avoidance, it is a major symptom for both anxiety and depression. When you look at 10 to 15-year-olds that say that they're running away from their problems in video games, in social media, in phone and tablet use, to me that speaks volumes. It says that we've got a generation of young people coming up that are finding much, much earlier than my generation did, that there's something out there that can make them feel better. There's something out there that can give them that dopamine hit that they're looking for. That scares me Because what that tells me is that heaven forbid these young people ever discover drugs or alcohol, because it's going to make games and social media and electronics use pale in comparison, and that's the scary part for me is that we are going to have a generation that already has been addicted, that's going to now step into an arena that becomes life-threatening.

Speaker 2: 14:29

As somebody who works in this field, who's somebody who's lived the life of addiction, that really, really scares me. As a dad, that scares me because I look at my kids. You know when they're not engaged in something. Oftentimes I find them with a phone in their hand. You know whether they're scrolling through videos on YouTube or whether they're playing a game or whether they're texting their friends. It's very common to see my kids with a phone in their hand, and I'm sure that a lot of you guys feel the same way. It's very common for me to have a phone in my hand, and I'm sure that there are times that I'm doing that to avoid dealing with some of my problems, whatever they might be.

Speaker 2: 15:09

A lot of this is okay. How am I going to be an example in my home for my kids of what healthy technology use looks like, and how am I going to model for them how to better regulate and manage some of the things that I go through in a way that it's not heavy handed? Hey, kids, look at me, I'm dealing with my depression in a different way or I'm dealing with my anxiety in a different way. I don't want to avoid my problems today in the way that I have before. That's not what I'm talking about, but really just to kind of help them understand like there are better ways to do this, model that behavior for them. Because at least in my home, I find that when I try to be overt about it and when I try to be more direct about it, the message is not received as well. And I don't know about you guys, but when I can be more of an example by behavior or lead by behavior, kind of dad, things seem to go a little bit better.

Speaker 2: 16:09

With this particular issue. It's hitting home, I guess, is what I'm saying with me currently, where a lot of times I speak about my drug use or alcohol use as a past tense issue. Today I'm talking to you about present tense and the fact that I do find myself using technology in a way that is probably unhealthy, and I hope that there are some of you out there that that might strike a chord with as well, because, as parents, I think that if we can admit that we're powerless and that our lives are unmanageable, as step one says, hey, maybe we can overcome this as well and the next generation won't have to suffer the same fate. I'm not trying to get preachy here on you guys, but certainly I think that this is a topic worth discussing. The one thing that the study did say is that the more time kids spent on social media, the more their depressive symptoms increased. I don't want to belabor the point here. I certainly just wanted to bring this to your attention.

Speaker 2: 17:06

This will be a shorter episode than normal, but I just thought that it was worth discussing because this article really jumped out at me, and it's certainly something that more and more over the years, I have been doing interventions on people, especially young men who have gone to college, who find themselves gaming, missing classes, failing out of school. There may or may not be other substances being used, but certainly there's an underlying issue that they're trying to run away from and their coping strategy is I'm just going to play video games all day, or I'm just going to be on social media all day, or I can't stop texting my friends, and so I've constantly got this phone in front of my face. It's becoming as disruptive in many of the lives of young people as drugs or alcohol are, but because it's a behavior that many of us as adults engage in and have problems with and I speak for myself as well is that we have problems with this. It's harder for us, without feeling hypocritical, to lead by example, and so I guess my challenge, both for myself and for you guys today, is, you know, let's let's take stock of what's going on in our lives and in the lives of the people that live with us. Let's let's take a look at what healthy technology looks like in our homes and and and let's look at how this is affecting relationships, because, at the end of the day, when I do interventions, the thing that's suffering most as I walk into that home is the relationship between the members of that family, and there's usually a straight line that can be drawn from the substance use or the alcohol use and fractured relationships. Sometimes we don't want to draw that straight line between technology use and fractured relationships, but I know that if I were to adjust my behavior around screen time and around phone use and around work, that my relationships with my kids would probably get better.

Speaker 2: 19:11

I guess that's my challenge today is, let's take stock of how we're doing this, and I would love some feedback from you guys, because, while this jumped out at me this week for a topic for the podcast, I find myself just in some of the problematic behavior myself, and so I'm curious to know that, as you guys, as listeners, do you have this going on in your life, in the lives of people, in your homes? How are you dealing with it? Do you have strategies that have helped you in your homes that you might want to share with me and, by so doing, share with other people? I would love some feedback on this topic, if you have it. As a dad, as a professional in this field, this is one area where I find myself less equipped with better knowledge and better practices than I would with substance use and alcohol use, and so I'd love some feedback on this from you guys. You can reach me at mattatpartywreckerscom. And, as always, guys, I hope your loved ones will get sober and stay sober.

Speaker 1: 20:23

Talk to you later. Ones will get sober and stay sober. Talk to you later. Us a question we can answer in a future episode. Please visit us at PartyWreckerscom and remember don't enable addiction ever.