Alarming data on adolescent mental health has spurred rare bipartisan agreement in Congress, where lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are advancing legislation that would impose new restrictions on social media platforms' interactions with users under 18 and mandate expanded mental health resources in public schools.
The legislation, dubbed the Children's Online Safety and Mental Health Act, cleared a Senate committee on Wednesday with a 16-2 vote, reflecting the unusual political salience of the issue. Sponsors argue that a decade of deteriorating mental health outcomes among teenagers — including rising rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm — coincides too closely with the mass adoption of smartphones and social media to be coincidental.
The American Psychological Association has called for urgent action, citing a 70 percent increase in diagnoses of major depressive disorder among adolescents since 2012 and a near-doubling of emergency department visits related to self-harm among teenagers in the same period. The group says the evidence connecting social media use to mental health deterioration is now sufficiently strong to justify precautionary regulation.
Technology companies have pushed back, arguing that the research is more equivocal than advocates acknowledge and that restricting access to platforms that many teenagers use for social connection and support could do more harm than good.
