Practices

Real footage of people dying circulates without any warning, sometimes buried inside a video that starts off looking harmless. Young people rarely raise this themselves, so it is worth asking.

Ask plainly what they have come across that they wish they had not seen, and how often it happens. There is no preparation before it and nothing…

Among teenagers, saying they want to die has become something you say when the bus is late. You can no longer read intent off the phrase, in either direction.

So the words neither prove there is danger nor prove there is not. What tells you is everything the words leave out: whether there is a plan, whether…

When a death is filmed and passed around, some of the people who watch it are not all right afterwards, and a few are put in real danger by it. Ask what has been going round.

The question is simple enough. Has anything about someone dying gone round your school or your feed lately, and did you see it. Then ask how it left…

Asked what all the scrolling had done to her most, one young woman did not say sad. She said angry, more or less all the time.

Constant irritability in a teenager usually gets worked up as depression or ADHD, and sometimes that is right. Saturation belongs on the list too,…

For some people the online part is not a side issue sitting next to the depression or the anxiety. It is one of the things holding them in place.

One young woman with a history of being bullied found her platform use feeding the depression, the social anxiety, the fear of leaving the house and…

There is a rough ladder for tech overuse. Build a schedule together with some outside control at first, add substitutes once the person can stop for a while, then more intensive care, and residential only when someone is entirely taken over by it.

The order matters more than the rungs. You cannot install a better alternative in someone who has no capacity yet to put the thing down, so a bit of…