Social media, adolescent mental health, and diet: a policy content analysis

Alongside the benefits of social media for information sharing and social connection, recent evidence suggests it can also have harmful impacts on adolescent mental health and diet, including anxiety, depressive and disordered eating symptoms, and body dissatisfaction. Using document analysis, this study examines how recent strategies, action plans, policies and guidelines released by international organisations leading in the areas of child and adolescent health capture and address the links between adolescents’ social media use and both their mental health and diet outcomes. Summative content analysis was used to catalogue the inclusion of terms related to social media, adolescent mental health and adolescent diet in each document, and individual policy recommendations and actions were then extracted and categorised to identify themes relevant to current adolescent health priorities that can be leveraged to address the negative impacts of social media use among this age group. Of the 31 policy documents analysed across 11 organisations, only one included explicit mention of a negative association between social media and both adolescent mental health and diet, while none made recommendations to address it. Emerging themes related to priorities for adolescent health included health services provision, knowledge promotion, online content regulation and environmental improvements, all of which have the potential to serve as leverage points to act on recent evidence related to adolescent social media use. While strategies to address the harmful effects of adolescent social media use on both mental health and diet are largely missing among the recent outputs of leading international organisations, their existing priorities for adolescent health, combined with emerging online tools and national legislation, may provide helpful paths forward.