Some clinicians compare heavy social media use to gambling or nicotine. Others think the word addiction is being handed out too freely. The disagreement is genuine, and the answer determines what kind of problem this gets treated as.
What the diagnostic manuals say
Neither reference work recognises it. Social media and smartphone "addiction" appear in neither the DSM-5, used by psychiatrists in the United States, nor the ICD-10 or ICD-11, the World Health Organization's classification.
That absence is not an oversight. The objection is specific: clinical addiction implies intense craving and identifiable withdrawal, and there is no consensus that heavy social media use meets that bar for most people. Both manuals do recognise gambling disorder, and ICD-11 added gaming disorder — so the bodies involved are willing to add behavioural addictions when they judge the evidence sufficient. On this one, they have not.
The argument on the other side
Anna Lembke, medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford's School of Medicine, defines addiction as "the continued compulsive use of a substance or behaviour despite harm to self or others". By that definition a great deal of scrolling qualifies, and her position is that digital media produces dopamine responses comparable to other addictive behaviours.
What has changed since this argument began is the venue. Lembke has given evidence in court, testifying that platform features — infinite scroll, algorithmic personalisation — are deliberately engineered to be compulsive, in her phrase to "drugify" human connection.
That shift matters more than it might appear. A disagreement among researchers about terminology is academic. The same disagreement in litigation over product design is about liability, and the standard of proof is different.
The test that does not need a diagnosis
Laurel Williams, professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine, offers a practical standard: if you feel you are spending more time than you should, and work, study, hobbies or relationships are suffering, that is the signal. Feeling drained, anxious or irritable after a session is another.
Three questions worth answering honestly:
- Do I keep picking up the phone in the middle of tasks?
- Have I tried to cut down and failed?
- Do I feel guilty about how much I use it?
Three yeses mean something needs to change, whatever anyone calls it. Nobody in the dispute argues that excessive use is harmless.
What actually helps
The evidence favours structural changes over willpower, for the straightforward reason that the product was built by people optimising against willpower.
- Turn off notifications for every social app. This is the single highest-value change: it moves the decision about when to look from the app to you.
- Add friction. Move the apps off the home screen, or log out after each use. Small obstacles work disproportionately well against automatic behaviour.
- Use the built-in time limits and let the phone lock you out.
- No phone in the bedroom. The last and first half-hour of the day are where most compulsive use lives.
- Replace rather than remove. A walk, a book, a call. An empty slot gets filled by the thing you were avoiding.
Lembke's own recommendation is more demanding: a 30-day complete abstention from one chosen behaviour, tracked daily. The reasoning is that a month is roughly what it takes for a dopamine baseline to reset, and that partial reduction does not achieve it. Whether a reader needs that or the gentler list above depends on which of the three questions they answered yes to.
None of this requires quitting. The goal is making use deliberate again.
Sources: the DSM-5 and ICD-11; Anna Lembke's published work and court testimony; Laurel Williams at Baylor College of Medicine; and Prothom Alo's original report.
