Adolescent Mental Health in the Age of Social Media: Clinical Risks and Policy Lessons From Australia’s World-First Under-16 Restrictions

Social media is now embedded in adolescent relationships, identity formation, sleep, learning, emotion regulation, and help-seeking. This clinically oriented narrative review synthesizes evidence on adolescent social media use and mental health, with emphasis on anxiety and depression, sleep, cyberbullying, body image and eating concerns, self-harm-related content, digital social support, family context, and policy responses. The review aims to provide clinicians with a practical framework for assessment and management while using Australia’s under-16 social media restrictions as a policy case study. Current evidence does not support a simple screen-time model. Risk appears more closely related to adolescent vulnerability, harmful or algorithmically amplified content, compulsive or loss-of-control use, cyberbullying, sleep disruption, social comparison, limited coping strategies, and the availability of offline protective relationships. Australia’s Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, in effect from 10 December 2025, creates obligations for age-restricted platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 from creating or maintaining accounts. This law should be understood as a platform-accountability intervention rather than a complete mental health intervention. Clinicians should assess social media use through functional impairment, sleep, mood, exposure to harmful content, cyberbullying, body image, self-harm risk, family media practices, and supportive online connections. Management should escalate when disclosures involve suicidal ideation, self-harm content, coercion, threats, image-based abuse, or severe sleep or eating disturbance. The goal is neither moral panic nor technological complacency, but safer digital environments and stronger family, clinical, school, and policy supports around young people.