The authors begin with a term that most readers will recognize instantly. Doomscrolling describes prolonged, often compulsive scrolling through social media content, a behavior that has become a fixture of daily routine for adolescents and emerging adults. The related clinical concept, problematic social media use, refers to preoccupation with platforms and a compulsion to engage excessively despite negative consequences. A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis in JMIR Mental Health found that such patterns are increasingly common among adolescents and young adults, and a 2026 scoping review on doomscrolling documented growing evidence of its influence on mental health. What has been missing, the authors contend, is a systematic way for healthcare professionals to recognize and assess these patterns in clinical settings.

Social media use warrants clinical attention precisely because its benefits and harms are reflected in everyday functioning. For many young people, platforms are a primary means of communicating with friends, connecting with communities, and consuming entertainment. Used well, this technology can positively influence mood, eating, sleep, self-esteem, and lifestyle behaviors. Used problematically, however, it may contribute to sleep disruption, compulsive checking, social comparison, exposure to harmful content, and difficulties with mood, anxiety, and academic functioning, particularly in vulnerable individuals. The clinical task, as the authors frame it, is twofold: recognize the harmful impacts of social media use on mental health and quality of life, and leverage the potential positive aspects of use to improve those same outcomes.

To gather evidence for their argument, the team conducted a secondary analysis of a previous study, exploring concurrent associations between problematic social media use and mental health symptoms. Their instrument was a clever adaptation. The CAGE questionnaire, a classic four-item screen for alcohol problems whose letters stand for Cut down, Annoyed, Guilty, and Eye-opener, was originally designed to assess problematic video game use in modified form. Thakur and Bodell modified it again, this time to target social media, and administered the adapted version to a sample of 273 emerging adults with a mean age of 18.30 years, a standard deviation of 1.14, 72.34 percent female participants, and 42.89 percent White participants. Participants screening positive on the modified social media CAGE, defined as two or more affirmative responses, were compared with those screening negative across a battery of validated mental health measures.

The results were statistically robust. Participants screening positive on the modified social media CAGE scored significantly higher on the Patient Health Questionnaire-8, a widely used depression screen, with a mean of 14.21 and standard deviation of 5.48, compared with a mean of 11.70 and standard deviation of 6.01 in the negative group, a difference yielding a Mann-Whitney U statistic of 10,338 and a p value below 0.001. Anxiety followed the same pattern. Generalised Anxiety Disorder-7 scores were higher in the positive group, with a mean of 12.54 and standard deviation of 5.54, versus a mean of 9.95 and standard deviation of 5.98 in the negative group, with U equal to 9,576 and p below 0.001. The positive group also had less favorable substance avoidance scores on the substance use section of the Lifestyle Habits Questionnaire, with a mean of 29.71 and standard deviation of 7.74, compared with a mean of 36.75 and standard deviation of 5.29, with U equal to 19,307 and p below 0.001.

Not every association survived the strictest statistical scrutiny. SCOFF scores, measured with a five-question screening tool for eating disorder risk, were higher in the positive-screen group, but the association did not remain significant after Bonferroni correction for four comparisons, which set the adjusted alpha at 0.0125; the observed p value was 0.025 with U equal to 12,697. Sensitivity analyses using a more stringent cutoff of three or more affirmative CAGE responses yielded the same overall pattern of results as the primary analysis. The authors are careful to note that their findings are cross-sectional, meaning they cannot establish direction of causation. Problematic social media use may worsen mental health symptoms, or distressed individuals may retreat into compulsive scrolling, or both processes may reinforce each other. Even so, the associations suggest that problematic social media use may be linked with clinically relevant mental health symptoms, highlighting the potential need to address it and support those who may benefit from intervention.

The practical proposals in the correspondence are refreshingly concrete. Training support for psychiatrists, pediatricians, family physicians, and other mental health providers in community care settings could improve recognition of problematic social media use. Education leaders and curriculum developers can treat the medical school curriculum, particularly mental health teaching, as a valuable starting point. Didactic teaching could include a section on social media consumption and its potential positive and negative impacts on health, placed alongside existing curricula on behaviors such as substance use, sleep, and psychosocial risk. One simple adaptation would be to add social media use as an item in social history-taking, the routine clinical interview that already asks about diet, exercise, and relationships. At the postgraduate level, psychiatry residents in child psychiatry and addictions rotations could be trained in the assessment and management of problematic social media use, and in how to leverage social media to improve psychological outcomes while minimizing risks of harm. For practicing psychiatrists, addressing concurrent clinical issues alongside identification and treatment would be another focus.

The authors argue that psychiatry as a specialty is particularly well positioned to identify and support individuals with problematic social media use, given its associations with mental health. History-taking is fundamental to the development of clinical skills, and a brief, structured screen could be introduced within psychiatry history-taking education across undergraduate, postgraduate, and continuing professional development contexts. Their preliminary findings suggest that the modified CAGE may represent a promising approach to screening, but the authors are explicit about the limits of the evidence. Further validity testing is needed to establish the reliability, sensitivity, specificity, and acceptability of the tool before supporting wider implementation of social media screening instruments in clinical education and practice. The four-item format has obvious appeal for busy clinics, but a screening question is only as good as the psychometric evidence behind it.

The broader context makes the timing of this argument significant. As concerning patterns of social media use are increasingly recognized by clinicians, researchers, and courts as a source of harm, the authors write, education curricula should evolve with changing social patterns to keep up to date with developing needs. The landmark ruling against Meta and Google, reported in the BMJ, involved harm to a child’s mental health and turned partly on questions of addictive design and failure to warn, issues that intersect directly with the clinical concepts of compulsion and preoccupation that define problematic use. Legal accountability and clinical recognition are converging on the same behavioral territory, yet most medical students still graduate without ever being taught to ask a patient about doomscrolling.

Ultimately, the correspondence is a call to raise awareness among healthcare professionals that problematic social media use may represent a meaningful and modifiable contributor to mental health difficulties. Education across undergraduate, postgraduate, and continuing professional development settings should equip clinicians to recognize problematic patterns of use early, assess their impact on mental health and functioning, and respond appropriately. The study received no specific grant from any funding agency, and all procedures were approved by the university’s Non-Medical Research Ethics Board with informed consent obtained from all participants. The authors report no conflict of interest. Whether the modified CAGE becomes a standard clinical screen or simply a teaching prompt, the underlying message is clear: the question of whether a patient has ever doomscrolled belongs in the psychiatric interview, and the skills to interpret the answer belong in the curriculum.

Subject of Research: Psychiatry and mental health education on problematic social media use

Article Title: “Have You Ever Doomscrolled?”: A Case for Teaching About Social Media Use in Psychiatric Education

Article References: Thakur, A., & Bodell, L. P. (2026). “Have You Ever Doomscrolled?”: A Case for Teaching About Social Media Use in Psychiatric Education. Academic Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40596-026-02457-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s40596-026-02457-y

Keywords: doomscrolling, problematic social media use, psychiatric education, CAGE questionnaire, depression screening, anxiety, medical curriculum, adolescent mental health, Ever, Doomscrolled, Case, Teaching

The study distributed an anonymous survey through the REDCap electronic data capture platform, reaching participants at every stage of medical careers, from students still in lecture halls to attending physicians running outpatient clinics. The investigators paired demographic questions with a questionnaire probing attitudes toward mental illness and with three well-validated screening instruments: the Patient Health Questionnaire-2, or PHQ-2, a two-item screen for depressive symptoms; the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-2 scale, or GAD-2, its counterpart for anxiety; and the CAGE questionnaire, a classic four-item screen for problematic alcohol use whose acronym stands for cutting down, being annoyed at criticism, feeling guilty, and needing an eye-opener drink in the morning. The brevity of these tools is precisely their strength, allowing researchers to capture symptom signals across a busy professional population without imposing a diagnostic interview.

Among the 277 participants who completed the survey, the headline finding on attitudes was genuinely encouraging. Roughly seven in ten respondents, 70.1 percent, agreed that mental illness should be regarded in the same way as any other medical condition. An even larger share, 77.8 percent, said they would be willing to receive care from a physician who has a mental illness, and 71.9 percent indicated that a colleague’s mental illness would not change their perception of that individual. These numbers suggest that the explicit, attitudinal layer of stigma, the kind measured by asking people directly what they believe, has eroded considerably within this academic medical community, and that the erosion holds across age groups.

Yet the symptom data tell a more troubling story. Screening-positive rates were 35.6 percent for anxiety symptoms and 18.7 percent for depressive symptoms, meaning more than a third of the physicians and trainees surveyed carried clinically significant anxiety signals. Most striking of all, 40.5 percent screened positive for problematic alcohol use on the CAGE questionnaire, a figure that was significantly higher among female respondents than male respondents. In a profession where alcohol misuse is often framed as a private coping mechanism, a positive rate above 40 percent on a validated screen is a signal that the occupational stressors of medicine are not being absorbed without cost.

The demographic patterns within the data add texture to that alarm. Anxiety symptoms were significantly more common among medical students than among their more senior colleagues, and among younger respondents overall, a gradient that the authors interpret as reflecting the acute pressures of training years. Self-reported history of mental illness diagnosis stood at 29.3 percent across the sample, and that figure was higher in women than in men, a difference that reached statistical significance. Rates of reported diagnosis also increased with the number of years out of residency and were highest, at 42.2 percent, among those working in outpatient practices, hinting that the cumulative weight of clinical responsibility, and perhaps the isolation of ambulatory practice, shapes mental health trajectories in ways that deserve closer study.

The single most consequential number in the paper, however, may be the smallest. Among respondents who reported having been diagnosed with a mental illness, only 11 percent had disclosed that diagnosis to their licensing board. This disclosure gap sits at the heart of the study’s conclusion. Physicians in the survey overwhelmingly endorse the principle that mental illness is illness, that a colleague with depression deserves the same regard as one with diabetes, and that they themselves would trust a mentally ill physician with their care. But when the question shifts from abstract attitudes to concrete administrative exposure, telling the state board that grants and can revoke their license, nearly nine in ten of those with a diagnosis stay silent.

That silence is not difficult to explain, and the authors point to the structural incentives that produce it. Licensing applications in many jurisdictions still ask probing questions about psychiatric history, and physicians reasonably fear that disclosure could trigger scrutiny, monitoring requirements, or professional repercussions that far exceed what the underlying condition would clinically warrant. Concerns about confidentiality compound the problem: in a profession built on referrals, reputation, and small professional communities, the perceived cost of being labeled can be career-defining. The result is a system in which the people most knowledgeable about psychiatric treatment are among the least likely to seek it through formal, documented channels.

The study’s methodology deserves attention when weighing these findings. As a cross-sectional, anonymous survey at a single academic institution, it captures a moment in time rather than a trajectory, and its 277 respondents, while spanning the career ladder, cannot be assumed to represent physicians everywhere. Screening instruments such as the PHQ-2, GAD-2, and CAGE are designed to flag symptoms that warrant fuller evaluation, not to deliver diagnoses, so the positive rates should be read as signals of probable morbidity rather than confirmed caseness. Self-reported history of mental illness, meanwhile, depends on respondents both remembering and being willing to report a diagnosis. The authors were careful to build in ethical safeguards, with approval from the Valleywise Institutional Review Board under study number 2023-003 and procedures conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the anonymity of the design was itself a response to the sensitivity of the subject matter.

Even with those caveats, the convergence of the data is hard to dismiss. The pattern, favorable attitudes coexisting with high symptom burden and minimal disclosure, is exactly what models of layered stigma would predict. Explicit beliefs can modernize quickly, driven by education, generational change, and public conversation, while the structural and internalized barriers that govern actual behavior change far more slowly. A medical student may sincerely believe that depression is a medical condition and still decline to answer a licensing question honestly, because the perceived stakes of disclosure operate on a different axis than belief. The gender differences in both diagnosed mental illness and problematic alcohol use further suggest that the pressures of the profession are not distributed evenly, and that wellness interventions calibrated to a generic physician may miss the populations carrying the heaviest load.

The authors close with a call that is both modest and urgent: accessible and confidential mental health resources, and continued wellness initiatives embedded in medical education and practice. The study was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Arizona Psychiatric Society in Phoenix in April 2024, and the researchers report no funding from pharmaceutical companies and no competing interests. What the findings ultimately expose is a gap between the culture physicians say they want and the system they actually navigate. Until licensing questions, confidentiality protections, and institutional support align with the attitudes that younger generations of clinicians already hold, medicine will keep producing professionals who believe in mental health care for everyone, except, in practice, for themselves.

Subject of Research: Physician mental health stigma, self-reported psychiatric illness, and screening for anxiety, depression, and alcohol use across medical training

Article Title: Physicians attitudes towards mental health and self-reported rates of anxiety, depression, and alcohol use

Article References: Loomba, N., Bhattarai, B., Ramos, G., Haerter, S., & Sood, S. (2026). Physicians attitudes towards mental health and self-reported rates of anxiety, depression, and alcohol use. BMC Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-026-08640-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12888-026-08640-7

Keywords: physician mental health, stigma, anxiety, depression, alcohol use, medical students, residents, licensing boards, PHQ-2, GAD-2, CAGE questionnaire, BMC Psychiatry