150+ Minutes of Social Media Daily Tied to Depression in Adults

MONDAY, Aug. 31, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Higher social media use is associated with self-reported depression in adults, according to a study published online Aug. 22 in npj Mental Health Research.

Martin L. Block, from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ilinois, and colleagues used data from 11 repeated cross-sectional surveys (2014 to 2024) of 183,000 adults aged 18 to 70 years to examine whether social media use was consistently associated with binary self-reported depression and whether it contributed to classification of self-reported depression.

The researchers found that balanced random forest models predicted self-reported depression with accuracies between 0.71 and 0.75 and areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve between 0.65 and 0.73 for each year. Shapley additive explanations dependence plots showed that at 150 minutes per day, the contribution of social media use to the model-classified depression shifted from neutral to positive.

“It”s a damning picture,” coauthor Hans Breiter, from the University of Cincinnati, said in a statement. “Social media is harmful for individuals across the lifespan. We should not subject ourselves to a product using addiction science to optimize our viewing time.”

Abstract/Full Text (subscription or payment may be required)