James Donaldson on Mental Health - How to improve mental health safety on social media – not just for young people

The settings featured in the mini course – from disabling like counts on Instagram to refreshing the For You feed on TikTok – disrupt some potentially harmful properties of the platforms for young minds.

The toolkit also walks users through scenarios of how social media use can affect mood, self-image, sleep patterns and more, and asks them to reflect on their own use and what they might want to change.

The team tested the mini course with young people.

They also included in the course quotes of advice from participants in the MyVoice study of youth, which has done text-message-based polling on social media and many other topics in teens and young adults for years.

Mott Children's Hospital child and adolescent psychiatrist Jane Harness, D.O., helped lead the mini course development and testing.

“We are all certainly constrained by the settings offered and the design of the platforms themselves,” she said.

“We have been able to introduce new information to young people about turning off the like counts, refreshing the For You or Explore pages, setting time limits and changing the content they are presented with on social media, but so much more could be done.” Discussions about social media use between parents and young people, or among young people, are crucial, she said.

“Some young people use these features and settings, as we showed in our study several years ago , while others are not aware they exist,” said Harness, who is an adjunct faculty member in the U-M Medical School Department of Psychiatry.

“A growing concern also includes AI chatbots," she said, which may play a role in suicidal thoughts or the onset of signs of psychosis.

The team behind the mini course acknowledges that social media can have positive effects for young people if used in moderation and with safety settings on – for example, connecting them with friends, family and a wider world of information and views.