Aligning how we measure and support social media addiction with young people's lived experience

Social media use is widely conceptualised as a potential addiction. However, the instruments used to index it are reformulations of criteria developed for established addictions, presuming pathology rather than establishing it. We inverted the direction of inference, integrating lived experience from adolescents who feel addicted to social media and experienced substantial life impairment as a consequence. We conducted eight in-person workshops with 44 adolescents (contributors) to discuss experiences constituting social media addiction, their perceived harms, and how those experiencing it could best be supported. We examined correspondence between lived experiences and features of established addictions, such as conflict (interpersonal struggles and loss of self-control), salience (preoccupation with social media), and tolerance (needing more to get the same effect). Discussions of how, by whom, and through what means adolescents could be supported were analysed using framework analysis. Correspondence between lived experience and the prevailing addiction model was partial and asymmetric. Of 121 experiences, 58.7% described conflict or salience, none described tolerance, and few described withdrawal (2.5%) or relapse (7.4%). A fifth (20.7%) fell outside the model. Effects on sleep, attention, mental health, and time displacement were ranked as most harmful, while impaired control and social comparison ranked lower. Discussions of support revealed a strong sense of individual responsibility, alongside agreement that platform redesign, provision of alternative activities, and shifts in social norms would be most effective. Clinical addiction intervention was rarely raised, despite frequent use of medical addiction language and analogies. These results raise questions about current addiction models and the assumption of pathology applied to social media use. Future work should move beyond these frameworks and ground conceptualisation and measurement in lived experience rather than predefined notions of disorder.