Nearly half of young people in a recent study displayed strongly addictive use of mobile phones, a trend that the study results suggest raised the risk of suicidal behaviors.

Researchers looked at data from surveys of almost 4,300 children from 2016 through 2022. The children were ages 9 to 10 at the start and were contacted four times over a six-year period. The surveys included questions about mobile phones, video games and social media and assessed the children for compulsive use, difficulty disengaging and distress felt when not using the various items.

After dividing use into three categories — low addictive, high addictive and increasing-use trajectory — the researchers found that 49 percent of the study population displayed high-addictive use of mobile phones, which the study defined as craving the use, inability to stop using or causing interference with daily life. Over 40 percent of the children also demonstrated high-addictive video game usage and some 10 percent exhibited high-addictive use of social media.

One of the more important features of the study, said co-author Yunyu Xiao, an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, was the assessment not only of addiction-like use at a single point in time, but also the identification of youths whose symptoms increased over several years. These trajectories suggest that a substantial group of young people developed problematic use patterns gradually, starting low and ending at high use.

Xiao said both those who exhibited “high” and “increasing” addictive use trajectories for social media and mobile phones had significantly elevated risk for suicidal behaviors and suicidal ideation — approximately 2 to 3 times higher than youths in the low-risk group. Video game use followed a similar trend, with high-addictive use increasing the risk of suicidal behaviors and thoughts compared to low use.

At the end of the four-year study period, 5 percent of the almost 4,300 children surveyed self-reported suicidal behaviors, and 18 percent said they’d had suicidal ideation or thoughts.

Interestingly, total screen time alone was not associated with suicidal behaviors or thoughts. “This finding challenges the common assumption that more screen time automatically means more harm,” Xiao said. “It suggests that the quality and emotional nature of digital use matters far more than the quantity.”

Because of that, she recommends: “Don’t just focus on time — focus on behavior. It’s not about how many hours your child spends on a device, but whether their use is interfering with sleep, school, relationships, or mood.”