Thank you for having me here, and my apologies that I could not be there in person. I very much would have liked to be.
Again, my name is Michael Cooper. I'm the vice-president of data and partnerships here at Mental Health Research Canada. We have been funded to collect ongoing trackers of mental health indicators since 2020, as a pandemic response, and since that time we've evolved to include a number of cross-sectional issues that intersect mental health. I can share some of them here today.
Specifically, I want to share a few things I've learned about age 16 and older. We don't collect any data for anyone under the age of 16. I can speak to a bit of other research on that topic. Specifically, I want to mention that we've been tracking online gambling specifically among youth. The algorithm is showing a lot of information about that particular issue and how that's driving problematic gambling.
I also can speak a bit about screen time. One of the things we've been tracking is the volume of screen time. We've identified that for a number of youth—essentially, for anyone who consumes more than six hours of personal screen time per day—there are significant mental health implications, from anxiety to depression and to suicide ideation. We've published some reporting on that. Of course, we've seen that youth aged 16 to 24 are the group most likely to spend more than six hours a day on screen time. Therefore, they would be the ones most impacted by these indicators.
The other issue I wanted to speak about a bit is how we have tracked social media specifically. We've tracked what youth are doing on social media: what sorts of activities; cyber-bullying; what their experiences have been along the lines of FOMO, the fear of missing out; and whether or not they're experiencing issues around comparing themselves to others as well. I've put together a deck and have sent it along to the group if you're interested in asking any questions about that specifically.
I do want to speak on a few other issues that are more general around mental health and specific to social media, where we would say that we've been tracking long-term trends since the 1970s on mental health. We have indicators that have tracked this since that time. They're not clinical in nature, but they do track general mental health indicators. We did see a significant shift in about 2004 for a lot of these youth in terms of their mental health, which would have corresponded to when a lot of these smart phones would have ended up in individuals' hands. We did see another movement again in 2020, through the pandemic, and not a recovery since that time as well. I want to highlight that this is another area of research we are privy to as well.
I want to highlight the social connection aspect of it. Individuals who are more connected to their community, to family and to loved ones are far more likely to have positive mental health indicators and to seek out help. We do know that for a number of individuals, the experience they're having online through social media is shallow, and not necessarily engaging with outside individuals could be one of those reasons why their mental health is poor if they're spending so much time on social media.
The other thing I wanted to speak to very quickly is this idea of influencers. I do not track influencers. However, I am a vast consumer of research, and I know that a tremendous amount of research exists on understanding how youth process, especially, advertising. We have this from past studies by Concerned Children's Advertisers.
We have a great amount of data on this. We know that youth are not fully developed in terms of their ability to discern between informational content and selling content. We also know that it becomes especially blurry if the line is blurred. If there's not a price tag at the end of an ad, most youth would not be able to identify that it is in fact an advertisement. When I think about influencers, I'm thinking about the fact that a lot of these influencers are being used to sell products to youth, essentially circumventing a lot of these Concerned Children's Advertisers laws that we've had over a period of time.
I'm more than happy to speak to any of these topics. These would be areas that we have data and expertise in. I probably have 300 stats on these issues. I don't want to just throw numbers at you, but I can assure you that we are tracking these issues and other issues such as body dysmorphia and eating disorders. We do know that about one in four young women is experiencing a high risk of eating disorders. A lot of that does tie in to social media as well. We're seeing connections with the high social media use as well. There are a lot of very troubling statistics around what's happening in mental health as it pertains to social media for youth.
Thank you.