How to make teens depressed? Let them watch TV
Years ago, your parents told you it was a bad thing to watch too much TV. It still is. A new study in the Archives of General Psychiatry indicates that greater exposure to TV by adolescents leads to increased risk of depression, particularly for males.
The study, led by Dr. Brian A. Primack of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, first surveyed the amount of time 4,100 healthy non-depressed adolescents spent watching TV or videos, listening to the radio or playing computer games. Seven years later, when the participants were in their early twenties, they were examined again.
The more TV they had watched, they more likely they were to be depressed.
“We did not find a consistent relationship between development of depressive symptoms and exposure to videocassettes, computer games, or radio,” the researchers reported.
Among the possible reasons for the TV/depression link: the fact that TV sucks up time that could be used for socializing and playing sports. Then there’s TV’s well-known ability to promote feelings of inadequacy among viewers, or even take the place of all-important sleep.
Or, you know, this might just be a bit out there, but couldn’t it have been that they were watching more tv because they felt isolated and depressed in the first place?