• Posted August 31, 2026

Social Media Increases Risk Of Depression, Study Says

Adults who spend hours scrolling social media every day are more likely to develop depression, a new study says.

Around 2.5 hours or more of scrolling per day is linked to self-reported depression, researchers recently reported in the journal npj Mental Health Research.

The study found that social media is more closely linked to depression than other factors like your job, your educational background, or your time spent playing video games, surfing the web or watching TV, researchers said.

“It’s a damning picture. Social media is harmful for individuals across the lifespan,” senior researcher Hans Breiter, a professor at the University of Cincinnati, said in a news release.

“We should not subject ourselves to a product using addiction science to optimize our viewing time,” Breiter said.

For the new study, researchers analyzed more than 183,000 surveys from 18- to 70-year-olds participating in an annual poll on media behaviors and influence, covering 11 years of surveys starting in 2014.

Analysis showed a link between depression and spending at least 150 minutes a day on social media, with this association appearing in each of the 11 years studied.

What’s more, social media became an increasingly more powerful predictor of depression during the 11-year period, researchers said.

This might be due to the evolution of social media, said co-author Nicole Vike, a senior research associate at the University of Cincinnati.

“Initially, social media was a social outlet with people you knew,” Vike said in a news release. Now, people typically consume content made by strangers and influencers.

“It’s crazy how addictive it can be. Look at chronically online content creators,” Vike said. “They often have to take a monthslong hiatus from being online for their mental health.”

The results confirm the steady stream of grumbles coming from social media users themselves, said researcher Johnathan Avant, a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati.

“You can see trends on social media where they talk about the mental health toll it has on them,” Avant said in a news release.

However, it’s probably unrealistic to ask people to quit social media cold turkey, the research team said.

“Social media is a common marker of our cultural age much like the automobile was more than a century ago,” lead researcher Martin Block, a professor emeritus at Northwestern University, said in a news release.

“But social media has an important negative effect through its association with depression, much like the automobile is associated with injuries from crashes and pollution,” Block added.

More information

The University of California-Davis has more on social media and mental health.

SOURCE: University of Cincinnati, news release, Aug. 26, 2026