No mental health harm from internet: Study

Links between internet adoption and psychological well-being are small at most, despite popular assumptions about the negative psychological effects of internet technologies and platforms, according to a major international study published by the Oxford Internet Institute.

The study examined data from two million individuals aged 15 to 89 in 168 countries, yet found smaller and less consistent associations than would be expected, if the internet were causing widespread psychological harm, according to the research team. The paper, "Global Well-Being and Mental Health in the Internet Age," has been published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.

Scientists carried out the study, which shows the last two decades have seen only small and inconsistent changes in global well-being and mental health.

Filtering the results by age group and gender has not revealed any specific demographic patterns among internet users, this includes women and young girls. In fact, for the average country, life satisfaction had increased more for females over the period.

The team maintains, "We put our findings under a more extreme test to see if there are matters which we have missed and we did find increased mobile broadband adoption predicted greater life satisfaction, but this association was too small to be of practical significance."

In this study, the researchers contrast two different studies of data on well-being and mental health against the countries' per capita internet users and mobile broadband subscriptions and use, to see if internet adoption predicts psychological well-being.

In the second study they use data on rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm from 2000–2019 in some 200 countries and analyze their associations with internet adoption.

Well-being was assessed using data from face to face and phone surveys by local interviewers in the respondents' native languages. Mental health was assessed using statistical estimates of depressive disorders, anxiety disorders and self-harm in some 200 countries from 2000 to 2019, as estimated by aggregated health data from World Health Organization member states.

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