Volume 23, No. 3, June 2025

Welcome to the June edition of Tips and Topics.

In SAVVY, note the shift away from spending time with friends and family to online activity. This highlights the importance of helping patients make friends; and especially for youth, to help them strengthen family ties and in-person social connections.

In SKILLS, a digital detox can be just as difficult as a substance detox. Strategies you might want to try. It’s time to educate ourselves about managing online activity and to teach our children and youth how to “drive” on the digital highway.

In SOUL, Father’s Day raises questions about the past as we reflect on what sort of dad did I have? Questions I wished I had a chance to ask my dad. Questions you might want to ask your dad if he is still alive.

I’m not sure how this research was done and even if the exact percentages are verified. But the trends speak for themselves in How and Where people spend their time 1930-2024. At the link, you can see the scrolling change in the bar graph percentages from 1930 to 2024. But for reference, note the percentages for Friends and Family (a combined 43.65%) in the year I was born, 1949, and then note the top winner in 2024: 60.76% for Online; 13.86% for Friends.

Within this context, here are a couple of related SAVVY TIPS.

Tip 1

Healing Patients by Helping Them Make Friends.

An article in Psychiatric News, Volume 60, Number 6, published in May 2025, told of “A woman in her 50s who had been living with schizophrenia for decades told her psychiatrist that she had made an important discovery about her symptoms: The voices that had been tormenting her would quiet down during her weekly book club meetings. The patient had started attending the book club as a distraction several years prior but soon became close with other members of the group. Those couple of hours of routine social activity each week became an essential part of how she managed her illness and her life.”

Anya Bershad, M.D., Ph.D., at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues are working to find ways to help other patients experience those same feelings of social benefit using a novel approach called social psychopharmacology.

• Patients leave the clinic armed with new skills and motivation, but not a new prescription.

• People with serious mental illness are far more likely to experience social symptoms such as reduced motivation to socialize or heightened reactivity to negative social cues.

• “Despite how debilitating and widespread these symptoms are, there are currently no effective pharmacological treatments,” she said. 

Dr. Bershad’s advice:

• The first step in helping patients involves not just asking about their psychosocial function but delving into the details. “A lot of patients come to us and say, ‘I don’t have any friends,’ and then we move on and don’t ask any further questions,” Bershad said. “But I think [it’s important to] understand, what’s driving this? Do our patients want friends but can’t get them?”

• Some patients may not want to leave their house because they’re scared someone is out to get them, whereas others just don’t feel motivated to do so, she added.

• Inquiring about patients’ social goals is a good way to reveal which dimension of social processes they are struggling with, and perhaps most importantly, which aspects they care about improving. “These questions, I think, are really important first steps in developing targeted treatments.” 

Tip 2

Family Dinners, Stronger Social Ties Boost Teen Sleep.

This article referenced COVID-era survey data from nearly 5,000 preteens and found that:

• Strong family ties and in-person social connections may contribute to healthy sleep in adolescents.

• “Social connectedness is tightly linked with mental and emotional health: Healthy, regular, in-person social connections, including parental monitoring, are known to favor well-being in adolescents,” lead author Marie Gombert-Labedens, PhD, with the Biosciences Division, SRI International, Menlo Park, California, told Medscape Medical News.

Good sleep is important for anyone. But especially for youth, Lack Of Sleep Alters Teens' Brains, Potentially Promoting Behavior Issues. Key Takeaways from this article:

• Teens with too little sleep experience brain changes that could make them more impulsive and aggressive.

• A lack of sleep interferes with connections in the brain’s default mode network.

• This network plays a critical role in decision-making and self-reflection.

SKILLS

With the allure of spending more and more time online, there is an urgent need to draw ourselves away from our obsession with screens.

Tip 1

Find a starting point for your Digital Detox.

I was shocked to check my iPhone Daily Average of Screen Time last week... 4 hours and 53 minutes! I’m still contemplating how serious I want to get about my Digital Detox.

Choose from strategies listed in Lifeline’s Support Toolkit:

• Turn off all non-essential notifications... Use the “do not disturb” (or focus on iOS) function at certain times to shut notifications off completely.

• Log out of, or uninstall social media accounts for your detox period.

• Remove addictive apps from your home screen to avoid being tempted to use them each time you unlock your phone.

• Keep track of your screen time and set a time limit for apps you’re trying to cut down on.

• Use digital tools to block access to your newsfeed on social media or entire websites. Some examples are #blockit (only for iOS), Stay Focused: Site & App Focused (Android), SelfControl (for MAC) and StayFocused Google Chrome extension for PC.

• Find a digital detox buddy and keep each other accountable. Besides providing each other with moral support, you could set each other's passwords for app time limits so you can't unlock them yourselves.

• Turn your phone screen to greyscale to make it less attractive and stimulating.

• Leave your phone at home or in a separate room when you don’t need it. Some examples might be when you're at work, going for a walk, shopping (just remember your bank card!), or going to the bathroom.

• Make your bedroom a phone-free zone. This might require getting an alarm clock and setting up a charger in another room.

• 20-20-20 rule: Take a break every 20 minutes, for 20 minutes, at least 20 meters away from your device.

Tip 2

Teach our children about the pros and cons of online screen time and how to manage their online activity.

Most States in the USA mandate driver’s education requirements for obtaining a driver’s license. Even if not mandated, driver’s education is advised for safety and preparedness. However, we are not focused on how to “drive” on the online highway of screens and apps.

I don’t envy parents, teachers and mentors who have to make decisions on how to manage online screen time for children and youth. Do you have answers for questions like:

• How early should I let my children use phone, tablets and computer screens? Or do I give into the temptation to hand a child the phone and use it as the electronic babysitter?

• Should phones be banned from the classroom? If so, how to implement a policy like that? Or if not, how to manage the distraction of screens in class education?

• What daily limit of time online is ideal for children, youth and adults?

• To what extent do I want to limit access to certain apps and social media?

• Do I make screen time a reward for getting homework done? Or does that make online time even more alluring like using candy as treats and rewards for shaping behavior?

• Should there be formal educational curricula at schools on how to manage online activity? Or is this a parents’ rights issue to allow them to decide what and how to educate their child about using screens?

• Should states and countries ban children under 16 from using social media platforms, including TikTok as did Australia recently?

There are many more complex questions about managing online activity. It starts with the adults in the room to first educate themselves about this subject; and then to be courageous enough to confront the sticky issues for children and youth.

SOUL

June 15 was Father’s Day in the USA. If you have six minutes to listen to the Prologue of This American Life’s Father’s Day edition, I defy you to not feel the pain of Aric who as a kid would record cassette messages to his dad hoping to hear back from him. His dad “would leave for six months at a time. He was in the Merchant Marines. He'd be in Guam or Scotland or God knows where.”

Years later Aric got to ask his father why, in all those years, he never got a response to his heartfelt cassette messages. The podcast shares the dad’s answers and Aric’s reactions.

My father died suddenly when I was 26 years of age. Back then I was too young and busy in building my career, friends and relationships to understand the value of sitting with my dad and asking questions about his life. Now I wish I could have asked him:

• What was it like to have your father die when you were just 17 years of age (his mother had died when he was even younger) leaving you with unpaid debts and responsibilities to care for younger brothers?

• How did you navigate work, family responsibilities and even decide on a career when you didn’t even complete elementary school?

• How did losing your father at such a young age affect and influence what kind of father you wanted to be with your three children?

• What was it like growing up in Australia when there was an explicit “White Australia Policy” that marginalized Chinese and other people of color?

If your dad is still alive and you have some issues, be curious for your own sake and healing as well as for his well-being, to ask him questions about his life. You might just get to know a whole side of you that was hidden; and meet a new dad viewed through a different lens.

UNTIL NEXT TIME

Thank you for joining us this month. See you in late July.

David