If you’re caring for someone with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or another serious mental illness, you probably don’t spend much time thinking about pediatric emergency rooms. Your loved one may be well past adolescence. But a study published this month out of the University of Rochester Medical Center is worth your attention anyway, because it puts a number on something many of us have suspected for years: technology isn’t just background noise in a mental health crisis. Increasingly, it’s part of the crisis itself.
The numbers
Researchers at Golisano Children’s Hospital reviewed more than 3,700 pediatric psychiatric crisis encounters from 2021–2022 at a large children’s hospital, looking at kids and teens ages 6 to 17. They found that 19.2% of those crisis visits — nearly one in five — involved what they called a “digital media or device-related problem”. That’s not a vague association. Kids in that group were nearly twice as likely to carry a mood disorder diagnosis, nearly twice as likely to come back for multiple crisis visits, and more likely to have suicidal ideation and a recommendation for inpatient hospitalization than kids whose crises didn’t involve digital media. The study also found a sex difference worth noting: girls were more likely to present with high-risk online sexual behaviors, while boys’ cases more often centered on device access conflicts and excessive use.
Dr. Meredith Gansner, the study’s lead researcher, put it simply: “Digital media is now woven into nearly every aspect of adolescents’ lives, but until now, we’ve had limited data on how often it actually plays a role in psychiatric crises.” Now we have a number, and it’s a big one.
Why this matters even if your loved one isn’t a child anymore
I write for caregivers of people with serious mental illness, and most of the people we’re caring for are adults. So why does a pediatric study matter here?
Two reasons.
First, most serious mental illness doesn’t start in adulthood. Schizophrenia typically first appears in the late teens to mid-20s; bipolar disorder often emerges in adolescence as well. If digital media is playing a measurable role in nearly 20% of psychiatric crises in kids as young as six, it is very likely playing a role in the pre-diagnosis years of the very people we now care for as adults — the anxious scrolling, the isolating late-night device use, the online spaces that validate rather than challenge distorted thinking. Understanding this pattern in adolescence helps us understand the on-ramp to the illnesses we manage today.
Second, if you are caring for someone with serious mental illness who also has children, siblings, or younger relatives in the house, this study is direct, actionable information about a different but related risk sitting in the same household. Mental illness has a genetic and environmental load that runs in families. A household already managing one person’s serious mental illness is not a household with spare capacity to also miss the warning signs in a teenager. This study gives you a concrete question to ask: is a young person in my life using digital media in a way that’s replacing sleep, isolating them from in-person relationships, or feeding beliefs no one is there to gently push back on?
What to actually do with this
I’m not going to tell you to take away every phone in the house — that’s neither realistic nor, frankly, always helpful. But this study, paired with everything I’ve been tracking about AI chatbots and delusional thinking in adults, points to the same underlying mechanism at every age: unsupervised, unchallenged digital interaction can deepen a mental health crisis that might otherwise have been caught earlier.
A few concrete steps, whatever age the person you’re worried about:
Ask specifically, not generally. “How much screen time are you getting” is easy to deflect. “What’s the last thing you talked about with [chatbot/app/online friend] that really stuck with you” opens a real conversation.
Watch for isolation, not just usage. The study’s strongest signal wasn’t time spent on a device — it was digital media replacing other supports. That’s the same pattern I’ve written about in adults using AI companions: the danger isn’t the technology, it’s what it’s displacing.
Bring it up at appointments. If a psychiatric evaluation is happening — for a teenager or an adult — this study is a legitimate reason to ask the clinician directly whether digital media use is part of their assessment. Dr. Gansner’s own point was that this connection has been under-measured for years; you don’t have to wait for it to become standard practice to raise it yourself.
Nineteen percent is a striking number precisely because it’s not a fringe finding. It’s a mainstream one, hiding in plain sight in emergency rooms across the country. For those of us already deep in the work of caregiving for serious mental illness, it’s one more confirmation that technology now belongs in the same conversation as medication adherence, housing, and family support — not as an afterthought, but as a core part of the picture.
Sources
Gansner et al., “An Examination of Digital Media and Device-Related Problems in Pediatric Hospital Visits for Psychiatric Crises” — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42220633/
University of Rochester Medical Center, “Nearly One in Five Pediatric Psychiatric Crises Involve Digital Media, New Study Finds” — https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/nearly-one-in-five-pediatric-psychiatric-crises-involve-digital-media-new-study-finds
Full-text article (PMC) — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13221820/
