What did you learn about their views?

The crucial central message is you cannot do a psychiatric assessment without asking young people about their online lives.

As young people said to us, you're missing half our lives.

And I think that's a key message to anybody who works in mental health.

The other message, you know, was what we talked about previously, that there are concerns about risks, but also that, you know, there are benefits as well.

And then the other message was they're not going to tell you about their online lives unless you ask, but they're not going to tell you if you ask in a really clumsy, judgmental way either.

So it's about how you ask that's really important.

But bringing this all together, what would be your key take-home messages for psychiatrists today when thinking about technology and young people?

Oh, our pleasure.

Um, before I start to talk about that in more detail, just to say that there is no universally agreed definition of social media addiction, um, or internet addiction.

However, there is, um, an international definition of gaming disorder and addiction, so we do have that.But there are particular features you would look for, for any form of addiction.

So the sorts of things you would look for, is that behavior the most important thing to the young person? Are they doing that constantly at the exclusion of everything else that's might be important in their lives, such as seeing friends face to face, or getting outside, or sleeping and eating properly? Do they start to get withdrawal symptoms if they stop doing it? For example, do they start to get really irritable? Um, and are they developing mental health problems as a consequence, for example, low mood?

Um-

The research is incredibly difficult, so there isn't a simple an- straight answer to any particular question with regards to the evidence base, and there's a number of reasons for that.

Much of the research is quite poor, so a lot of it, for example, might ask lots and lots of children, "How much time do you spend on social media?" That's not particularly useful if you don't know what they're doing on it.

Um, and also we know kids don't report accurately either.