Digital Saturation and Adolescent Wellbeing: Assessing Daily Screen Time Against a Comprehensive Mental Health Battery

This study evaluates the cross-sectional association between daily non-academic screen time and multidimensional psychological wellbeing in adolescents using a mental-health screening battery. A diverse cross-sectional sample of 100 participants aged 13 to 18 completed the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), and UCLA Loneliness Scale (Version 3). Screen-time data were obtained from native mobile operating-system tracking logs to reduce reliance on retrospective self-report estimates. The aggregated sample demonstrated an average daily non-academic digital exposure of 5.12 hours (SD = 1.68). Pearson correlation analyses showed positive associations between screen duration and depressive symptoms (r=0.58, p<.001), anxiety symptoms (r=0.54, p<.001), and perceived loneliness (r=0.42, p<.01). Segmented linear regression identified an apparent non-linear inflection point near 3.5 hours per day within this sample. These findings add to research reporting associations between heavier adolescent screen exposure and poorer mental-health indicators, while not establishing that screen time itself causes psychological distress (Keles et al., 2020; Nakshine et al., 2023; Stiglic & Viner, 2019).