We need to understand the effect of the pandemic on mental health, and this study with 5000 teenagers will be a vital contribution when it’s out.

But this article is problematic for several reasons:

(thanks @ProfThomasDixon for highlighting) https://inews.co.uk/news/health/uk-teens-hit-by-mental-health-crisis-during-the-pandemic-as-rates-of-depression-and-anxiety-more-than-double-970424

1. The study is not published yet, so there’s no way to look in any detail about what the study did (eg who participants were, what measures were used)

2. Therefore no clarification of what is meant by ‘depression’, ‘anxiety’, ‘clinically depressed’ etc – are we talking about understandable, transient effects of stress (which are still important!), or something that might usefully be considered a disorder?

3. Saying 'This has prompted an 80 per cent increase in their social media and smartphone use, which is thought to have further contributed to their anxiety' assumes social media is having a neg effect on MH, when the opposite might be true (eg. increased social connection)

4. Increase in teenagers’ sleep is framed as a problem, but extra sleep might actually be an unexpected benefit of the pandemic. Teenagers were chronically sleep deprived before

5. Speculation about long-term effects ('could be storing up major mental health problems for the future') is necessary to a point, but can come across as scaremongering when we know so little about this at the moment

6. It doesn’t balance the idea that not everyone has been badly affected, and some teenagers’ MH has actually improved in the pandemic (which is important in its own way: what was it about their previous life, particularly school, that wasn’t working?)

Of course, some adolescents have been very negatively affected by the pandemic and we urgently need to understand who they are and how to help them.

But it would be great if these articles came *after* the data has been published, with more detail and links, so we can look at what was actually found, and it would be helpful to promote more balance and awareness of individual differences