The clinical implications of digital technology

Abstract

The proliferation of digital technology within the lives of children and young people (CYP) provides arguably one of the most significant clinical and ethical paradigm shifts in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. One can argue that mental health research has taken a myopic approach to understanding the interaction between young people’s technology use and their mental health. Mental health clinicians also need a better understanding of the digital lives of CYP and how technology may be supporting or harming their mental health. Within this paper, we argue that greater longitudinal research is required, particularly in vulnerable groups, and that there is an essential need for a standardised digital use assessment (DUA) tool, which assimilates CYP use of technology and their vulnerabilities/resilience to online risks. We subsequently offer a series of questions clinicians can use to explore technology use by CYP. Such an aide memoire may empower clinicians to have wider discussions around digital technology use with CYP, while also helping to develop appropriate safety and management plans.

From “online brains” to “online lives”: understanding the individualized impacts of Internet use across psychological, cognitive and social dimensions

“…Along with age and gender, other studies have begun to observe that individual characteristics and situational factors can affect vulnerability to adverse outcomes of Internet use, typically finding that the same risk factors which increase marginalization and disadvantage "offline" (such as family dysfunction, mental health problems, disability, subjective feelings of loneliness and social isolation) also increase the vulnerability to online harms in young people [21][22][23][24] .…”

“…Moreover, the gravity of the issue of exposure to suicide-related content has been highlighted by a study 30 reporting that almost a quarter of young people who died by suicide in a UK sample had suicide-related Internet experiences (e.g., searching for methods of suicide). Since these discrete threats from online world have been comprehensively examined elsewhere 22,31,32 , we instead seek here to elucidate how the nuances of general Internet usage, apart from these high-risk activities, may affect cognitive and psychological outcomes.…”