Impact of excessive social media use on adolescent depression and its consequences in France: An individual-based microsimulation model

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Source: PLOS Medicine

Original: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1004737...

Published: 2025-10-21T14:00:00Z

A French study examined the impact of excessive social media use on adolescent depression using a computer model that followed 18.6 million adolescents born between 1990 and 2012.[1] Research has found that excessive use of social media likely played an important role in the recent increase in depression rates among this group.[1] According to the simulations, excessive social media use was associated with an additional 590,000 cases of depression, 799 deaths by suicide, and a loss of 137,000 years of life compared to scenarios without social media platforms.[1] A study estimated that limiting social media use to 1 hour per day could reduce the lifetime prevalence of depression by 14.7%, while replacing 30 minutes of social media with physical activity would reduce depression by 12.9%.[1] The authors identified costs associated with excessive use of social media amounting to 3.94 billion euros.[1] However, the study points out that the modeling cannot determine direct causation and relies only on measures of duration of use without considering the type of content or quality of engagement.[1]