Left to Our Own Devices: Smartphone Use, Mental Health, and Academic Psychiatry

Academic psychiatry must take steps to advance research and promote awareness of the impact of smartphone use on mental health, incorporate smartphone use in clinical training and clinical care, promote healthy smartphone use, and improve understanding of ethical issues related to problematic use. Along these lines, research has found that the presence of a cellphone can diminish the perceived quality of face-to-face social interaction, impair performance on cognitively demanding tasks, and reduce productivity at work, school, and home [3]. [...]the association between smartphone use and mental health may be much weaker than some scholars claim; another large-scale survey of adolescents found that the association between smartphone use and mental health explains at most 0.4% of variation in well-being [4]. [...]because contemporary research relies on cross-sectional studies instead of randomized control trials, scholars have been unable to demonstrate that smartphone use causes mental health issues. Many of these companies spend tremendous resources explicitly designing their products to maximize use (e.g., infinite newsfeeds), raising ethical questions about responsibility for problematic use in vulnerable populations. [...]the relationship between smartphone use and mental health remains undertaught in medical training.