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Julie Payne is conflicted about her 16-year-old daughter’s social media use. 

Unlike her daughter, Payne’s generation could leave their school issues on campus. 

“Before social media, you had a chance to be alone and quiet,” said Payne, whose daughter is a student at Palisades Charter High School. “Now I think it’s harder to tune out the voices.”

Palisades Charter High is one of ten LA schools featured in the new FX documentary series ‘Social Studies’, which portrays just how deafening those online voices are, and how social media can put teens’ mental health in danger. 

Payne has seen first hand how social media has affected her daughter’s mental health. 

“She’s had depression,” Payne said of her daughter. “I think [social media] is a factor, and it’s hard to tease out what the cause of those kinds of things are.” 

The Los Angeles mom isn’t the first person to notice a link between social media and mental health issues. 

In 2021, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy published a public health advisory that linked teenage mental health problems with social media use. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported an increase in feelings of depression in teens from 28% in 2011 to 42% in 2021. However, CDC researchers have not conclusively linked social media to teen mental health issues.

That hasn’t stopped LA Unified and other districts from taking action to reign in students’ use of social media. The nation’s second largest district in January will implement a systemwide cell phone ban to curtail the use of social media on campus. 

‘Social Studies’ series director Lauren Greenfield said she hopes her documentary will lead to even tighter regulations. 

“There’s no childhood,” Greenfield said in a Los Angeles Times interview to discuss the series and the impact of social media. “You can’t keep your child from seeing devastating things, and they can’t even keep themselves from it.” 

Over more than 150 days, Los Angeles students provided Greenfield’s documentary team with unprecedented access to their lives through screen recordings of all their phone activity. 

Those screen recordings provide ‘Social Studies’ viewers with a front-row seat to issues in LA teens’ online lives ranging from first heartbreaks to cyberbullying from anonymous accounts. 

Vasara Schafer, who has a 16-year-old daughter at Palisades Charter High School, told LA School Report she does not allow her children to be on social media because she deems it too dangerous. 

Schafer said she’s heard too many nightmare stories about social media, including a recent report about a child who received inappropriate messages from an adult online.   

“It was a female child, and it turns out that a guy had been molding and shaping her to meet up and wanting her to do inappropriate things,” Schafer said. 

Some teens are more susceptible to the mental health risks of social media than others. A study published by the University of Southern California this year found teenagers struggle with mental health differently depending on their gender and race. 

The study also found many schools lack adequate mental health services to meet the needs of vulnerable students. 

“There’s some good debate to be had about what’s the appropriate place to support children’s mental health and whether schools can really take that on,” said Morgan Polikoff, one of the study’s co-authors and a professor of education at USC Rossier. “But clearly, there’s a need…and that need is different based on children’s age or their gender.”

In the ‘Social Studies’ series, a Los Angeles teen named Jonathan is seen volunteering at Teen Line, an anonymous hotline where teens can speak with other trained teens about their mental health struggles. 

Throughout the series, other featured teenagers candidly discuss mental health challenges in therapy-like circles. Dominic, 17, shared he missed school and had difficulty getting out of bed after online bullies repeatedly targeted his sexuality, race and body. 

Maren, 16, said she fasted for 91 hours when social media algorithms led her down a spiral of content creators promoting anorexia. 

The series also shows how the dangers of social media can trickle down to LA’s middle school students. In the first episode of the documentary, Jonathan helps an eighth-grade girl who was groomed online by a man twenty years her senior.

“I’ve become more consciously aware of the effects that social media has in the lives of teens,” Jonathan said in the documentary. “I think a lot of the issues have also affected me in some way or another.” 

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.