THE Royal College of Psychiatrists is urging practitioners to consider the impact of social media when assessing young people for mental health problems. The RCP has said that the use of technology should be a routine part of all assessments carried out. This is both to safeguard young people and to ensure that the clinicians are up to speed changes in digital technology.

Eh, what? Is this really only happening now? How can it be the case that this is not standard practice already?

Social media ain’t all that new, and there have been growing concerns about how its use impacts the well-being of younger users. Plenty of adults can attest to the negative impact constant connectivity has on our lives. It’s not a huge stretch to imagine that this could be even tougher for teenagers caught in the mires of adolescence.

As the mother of a young person who sees the detrimental impact too much social media has on her, the lack of probing around technology seems like a shocking omission by the professionals here. Much like the platforms suddenly trying to grapple with the beast they’ve helped create, this clarion call for sense smacks of too little too late.

I’m not suggesting that we blame social media uncritically for the problems young people face – but we have got to recognise digital spaces as a pipeline for harmful material. That is just common sense. Everything is available to a young person within a couple of clicks regardless of whether that material is beneficial, neutral or potentially harmful. We should know this from our own lived experience, let alone quantifiable empirical data.

As someone who has self-harmed as a teen, and who is still coping with the legacy of mental health crisis experienced nearly 20 years ago, I am shocked that the health service is still playing catch-up. Back then, in the internet’s relative infancy, this was a problem. Even on a dial-up connection and without the range of platforms we have today, accessing potentially harmful material and then was easy. Even though we were less digitally present than we are today, I was searching out ways to connect with other people experiencing similar difficulties to the ones I was going through. This is a natural human impulse, easily facilitated by the internet.

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Back in the early noughts, it was easy to find pro-ana (pro-anorexia) websites listing techniques, tips and tricks, with even less accountability than we have today. People built their own sites on the topic, which were shared across networks. Young people were using the likes of LiveJournal to express themselves and to document their eating disorder journeys, as well as discussing methods of self-harm. You could easily find information on how to hurt yourself whilst concealing it from adults in your life. We were sharing supremely harmful things with one another as a means of connection. I remember browsing websites that documented suicide methods committing by how lethality and how potentially painful they were. That material existed then – it was just less visible to outsiders.

Even then, it was also so easy to meet people who could exert an influence on the way you were feeling. We didn’t have Instagram, but we had forums, Faceparty and MySpace. We couldn’t add someone on WhatsApp, but we could share an email address for or Yahoo Chat or MSN Messenger that would allow us to communicate much the same way, with comparative immediacy to what kids have now. The only difference is really that we had to do it through desktop or laptop computer and the dial-up connection. The technology might be more sophisticated, but the problem of youths seeking out harmful material when they are feeling low is not new.

When I was admitted to hospital as a young teenager because of my eating and self-harm, not once was I asked about the material I may have accessed online – even though it was known to my health providers that I was a tech-savvy teen who had built her own website. That information was not teased out, and it most certainly was not volunteered by me. Missing it then might be understandable. Today it is inexcusable.

In the intervening years, there has been so much research into the ways the connectivity impacts the young person’s mental health. I find it staggering that those questions are not being asked in every consultation. Have we learned nothing in the last two decades about the impact of the internet on young people, and what we can do to safeguard them?

It is precisely because of my own experiences online, and knowing how material I accessed compounded my own feelings, that I’m so judicious about what my children access. Not everyone who parents a young person will have similar insight. As parents, we need to be able to rely on our mental health professionals to be up to date in terms of their assessment criteria. We need to be able to trust that they can comprehensively spot the red flags. If we’re not asking the correct and relevant questions of young people today then we are failing them.

It is essential that we build kids resilience to online harm, and it should absolutely be the case the parents are aware of the potential impact of being constantly online – but we’ve got to have some safeguards. Not every young person is going to have the sort of relationship with their parents that is conducive to keeping them safe and healthy. In fact, it is likely the case that many of her most at-risk young people are the ones least able to rely on their caregivers for the sort of support that they need.

We know that in certain contexts being online is harmful. It’s high time those in positions of responsibility got their act together.