OTTAWA, ON (April 15, 2025):
Depression has doubled. Anxiety has quadrupled. Emergency room visits for self-harm among teenage girls have surged 138 per cent. The culprit? Smartphones and social media.
A new report from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute by policy analyst Jonah Davids reveals the devastating consequences of widespread social media use on Canadian youth mental health and offers urgent solutions to address this growing crisis.
Wired for Worry: How Smartphones and Social Media are Harming Canadian Youth shows that the mental health of young Canadians has declined dramatically as social media usage became ubiquitous.
“Mental health declines across provinces, countries, and continents point towards a transnational cause, and social media usage fits the bill as one of the few widely adopted technologies over this period that has fundamentally changed how humans relate to one another,” writes Davids.
The report details disturbing provincial trends, including how “In Ontario, the number of teens aged 13 to 17 visiting the emergency room for self-harm increased by 138 per cent for girls and 75 per cent for boys between 2010 and 2017.”
The report offers six concrete policy recommendations, including raising the minimum age for social media to 16, noting that “regulating the content teens encounter is likely to have less of an impact than outright prohibiting them from using social media.”
“The goal is to restore the kind of childhood most adults remember, where social connections were built in-person and social media played a minor role,” states Davids.
The report comes as four Ontario school boards have launched multi-million-dollar lawsuits against social media companies for harming student mental health, and as provinces implement various cell phone restrictions in schools.
To learn more, read the full paper here:
For further information, media are invited to contact:
Dagny Pawlak-Loerchner
Senior Communications Officer
613-482-8327 x113
dagny.pawlak-loerchner@macdonaldlaurier.ca
