An official with the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services (TDMHSAS) said in a recent interview that mental illnesses among children are on the rise in the Volunteer State, as the state’s Attorney General works to tackle some of the potential root causes of those illnesses.
“The data from all sources point to that we see increased sadness and hopelessness among high school students,” TDMHSAS Deputy Commissioner Matthew Yancey told WKRN. “We’ve seen increases in emergency room presentations related to psychiatric emergencies, increases in suicidal ideation.”
Yancey says the state, through the General Assembly, is allocating more resources towards battling mental illness in children, including mental health provider retention and recruitment. Using money allocated during the August special session of the General Assembly, the state plans to hire 4,000 more mental healthcare professionals and wants to place a behavioral health specialist in every school.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti is battling in court to keep social media companies in check. He is leading a 40-state lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Instagram, which claims that the tech giant knows its product is harming children psychologically.
“Meta has known for years that Instagram causes psychological harm to young users,” said Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti in an October press release. “Rather than take steps to reduce or disclose the harm, Meta leaned further in to [sic] its profit-maximizing approach that hurts kids. Targeting kids with a harmful product and lying about its safety violates the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act. Meta knows every last design decision that made Instagram addictive to kids and that means it knows exactly how to fix the problem. We’re suing to make the company fix the problem.”
Skrmetti’s lawsuit claims that Meta knew Instagram was causing a litany of mental health issues, including “increased levels of depression and anxiety, increased hyperactivity, lack of sleep, and other mental health harms,” but that it “concealed the extent of the harms suffered by young users addicted to the use of its platform.”
Studies linking social media use to mental health deterioration.
There may be hundreds of papers that present correlations between social media and well-being, and many of them are great and highly informative, but we still know little about which way the effect runs,” according to Alexey Makarin, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Makarin said that while the correlation between increased social media usage and declining mental health is apparent, more research needs to be done to determine whether there is scientific causation between the two.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on X / Twitter.
