Geoffrey Branger 06:25, September 28, 2022
An American study points to the "Doomscrolling", translate the "morbid scroll".
This term refers to reading and scrolling through bad news on social media without stopping.
Teenagers who are hyper-connected are confronted with anxiety-provoking subjects on a daily basis.
A practice that causes some young people to have mental health problems that can go as far as depression.
Maya is a 13-year-old schoolgirl, she spends several hours a day on social networks, and despite her young age, she realizes that sometimes what she sees is anguish.
"When I watch videos or images about the war in Ukraine or ecology on Twitter, it scares me a little."
She is not the only one in this situation, more than 20% of college and high school students suffer from this unlimited consumption of negative information.
Sabine Duflo is a psychologist, specialist in digital technology and its impact on youth, she explains that it is partly because of the functioning of social networks: "The teenager who goes on social networks and practices "Doomscrolling" seeks to have strong feelings, with violent, moving, spectacular content. But in reality, it is the algorithms of the applications that are responsible. The more we consume this type of content, the more we will have in our feed, it's a vicious circle ."
She adds: "Everything is done so that it is much more difficult to stop than to continue watching."
Doomscrolling can lead to depressions
According to recent studies, Doomscrolling could lead to several mental disorders in adolescents, increased stress, anxiety or even insomnia, and in some rarer cases, it can go as far as depression.
This practice refers to the fear of missing something that happens online, and it creates anxiety among young people.
>> Find Europe Matin in replay and podcast here
But beware, doomscrolling does not create problems: it amplifies them, as explained by a psychologist and specialist in digital practices.
"Someone who is anxious will try to regain control over the information and suddenly will seek all the more information to reassure themselves, the problem is that it has an opposite effect, which will regenerate anxiety, but the anxiety was already there beforehand”, details Vanessa Lalo.
Three out of four teenagers take to social media as soon as they wake up
Most experts denounce in particular that middle and high school students are too dependent on their telephones.
Today, three out of four teenagers go on social networks as soon as they wake up and scroll almost mechanically, without realizing it, images and videos on their phone (for all French people, it is 45 %).