AAP receives funds to launch center on social media, youth mental health
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The AAP said it will launch a National Center of Excellence on Social Media and Mental Wellness using $10 million in funding from the HHS, through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
The AAP and others have warned that a pandemic-related worsening of pediatric mental health constitutes a national emergency.
The AAP said in a press release that the new center will serve as a “centralized, trusted source for evidence-based education and technical assistance to support the mental health of children and adolescents as they navigate social media.”
“We are thrilled to have been selected to lead and sustain vital work in an emerging field whose relevance has grown, especially over the past few years,” said AAP CEO Mark Del Monte, JD. “With our deep expertise in both mental health and in digital technology, and with the growing crisis in child and adolescent mental health continuing to be an area of organizational focus, there could not be a more important time for AAP to help confront these challenges and use our voice to make needed change for children and adolescents.”
Megan Moreno, MD, MSEd, MPH, FAAP, vice chair of digital health in the department of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Jenny S. Radesky, MD, FAAP, associate professor of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, were appointed as the center’s co-medical directors.
“In the past 10 years, we have seen the rise of social media become an important factor in adolescent health, and we've also seen digital media more broadly impact younger ages,” Moreno said. “We've been thinking about and working on ways to better provide parents with resources and tools to be able to help their kids navigate that digital space, so this center really brings together a lot of a lot of ideas we've been working on.”
Among the center’s first tasks, Moreno said, will be a scoping investigation of the pediatric social media landscape.
“We know that there's other excellent resources out there, and so our job is not to reinvent things, but to look for new ways to fill the gaps and share the content that is already out there,” Moreno said.
She added that the center would like to explore social media’s different effects on children.
“It's not something where we can say, every kid that interacts with social media is going to have detrimental effects, or it's going to lead to depression or worsen existing depression,” Moreno said. “But it's also not the case that every kid that interacts with it is going to feel better or feel supported or feel like their mental health is improved by their interactions with it. This idea of differential effects is something that's really growing in evidence and it's something that we need to be able to contend with as we think about building new courses for families.”
She added that parents and adolescents are the center’s primary audience.
“Our goal is to provide education and resources and collaboration with other folks who interact with kids on a daily basis,” Moreno said. “So that would include pediatricians, and it would also include educators and mental health providers. This is an opportunity for the AAP to expand its audience in certain ways to bring all the voices in child mental health to the table and make sure that we're thinking about those different roles when we're designing resources.”
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