We’ve spent years warning teenagers about cigarettes. Now, Britain’s most senior doctors are saying we should be just as worried about their phones.
The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, which represents nearly a quarter of a million doctors across the UK, has called on GPs and paediatricians to start routinely asking young patients about their screen time and social media use during appointments. The comparison they’re drawing is stark: heavy social media use, they argue, poses risks to adolescent health on a par with smoking.
It’s a bold claim, but the reasoning isn’t hard to follow. Disrupted sleep, anxiety, depression, body image disorders, and exposure to harmful content are all linked, in growing bodies of research, to prolonged use of platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. These aren’t fringe concerns. They’re showing up in GP surgeries and CAMHS waiting rooms across the country.
The Academy’s position is that doctors shouldn’t be passive observers.
“This is a public health issue, and clinicians need to be part of the conversation,” the group’s guidance makes clear, urging that screen time becomes as standard a topic as diet or exercise during consultations with children and adolescents.
Critics will point out that the comparison to smoking isn’t perfect. Cigarettes cause direct, measurable physical harm. Social media’s effects are more varied, more contested, and not uniformly negative. Plenty of young people use these platforms to build communities, find support, and express themselves in genuinely healthy ways.
But defenders of the status quo are becoming harder to find. Even some of the engineers who built these platforms have publicly acknowledged that the engagement mechanics were designed to be addictive. The average British teenager now spends around three to four hours a day on social media. That’s not casual scrolling. That’s a significant portion of their waking life.
What remains genuinely unclear is what doctors are supposed to do once they’ve asked the question. Advice and awareness are one thing. Workable solutions, especially for overstretched NHS practitioners, are quite another.
Perhaps the more pressing question isn’t whether social media is bad for young people. It’s whether the adults responsible for their care, in clinics, in government, and in tech boardrooms, are finally ready to act like it.
