I’m a psychoanalyst. Social media is damaging children’s inner lives in ways we don’t fully understand | Robin Kirman

During the landmark social media addiction trial that led to Meta’s recent $17.1bn settlement, a therapist testified that she had once asked the plaintiff – a young woman named Kaley, who had been using social media since she was six – what her miracle day would look like: what she wished to come true, if anything were possible. Kaley replied that she would be prettier.

As a psychoanalyst, I find that exchange devastating in a particular way. A miracle day is an invitation to engage with the full range of human desire: with what one might accomplish or experience, whom one might encounter or love. Kaley’s answer contracted the world and all its possibility into a single preoccupation with her own image.

Kaley’s testimony echoes what I hear from many of my younger patients: teens who are often out of touch with what they want from life, not temporarily undecided, but fundamentally unable to locate a sense of what matters to them. Most also feel consumed by a preoccupation with how they appear – with their bodies, their standing in others’ eyes – that is brutal and unrelenting. These struggles are often accompanied by a cluster of symptoms that have come to define the youth mental health crisis: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, self-harm, social withdrawal.

Researchers and clinicians have linked these symptoms to heavy social media use, but the discussion has been largely confined to documented behavioral outcomes. What the public conversation has not sufficiently addressed is what social media addiction does to young people’s inner lives, and specifically, the damage done to their emerging desires and identities.

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt argued that what you genuinely care about is, in some fundamental sense, what you are. DW Winnicott, a British pediatrician turned psychoanalyst, arrived at a similar insight through the study of childhood development: desire and identity are inseparable. For Winnicott, the capacity for genuine desire is not innate but developed, and it develops only when a child is free to follow impulses that arise from within. Winnicott was writing about early childhood, but his account, I’d argue, also applies to the years that follow. The child who climbs a fence to see what’s on the other side, who starts a game in the street and finds others drawn in, who keeps pulling books off the shelf until she finds one that addresses her latest curiosity – she is learning that her desires matter, that they can direct her and shape her experience of the world. She discovers not only what she wants, but who she is: her true self, in Winnicott’s terms.

Social media systematically undermines that process. The trial’s expert witnesses explained how these platforms function at the neurological level: they hijack the brain’s dopamine reward system, holding it in a state of chronic activation. The work of the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, who identified and named the brain’s primary motivational circuit, adds a crucial refinement: what social media exploits is not the pleasure system but the Seeking system, the forward-reaching drive toward wanting itself, the engine of curiosity. What addiction does is fix this system on a compulsive object, stripping desire of its natural range and spontaneity. The platform exploits the Seeking system’s sensitivity to novelty to capture attention and keep it. The result is a distorted relationship to desire: wanting that has been severed from its natural objects in the world and fixed on the feed.

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan gave a name to this kind of distortion: jouissance, a corrupted form of desire severed from what genuinely matters and fixed on substitutes that keep it running without resolution. Such desire – the kind social media addiction produces – no longer orients; it dysregulates, becoming out of control. For some, the response is a relationship to desire built around suppression: of appetite, as in eating disorders, or of sexual and romantic desire – its decline increasingly documented among young people today. For others, desire gets channeled into substitute circuits: compulsive shopping, video game playing, online betting – each carrying the felt sense that something is at stake, while pulling desire back into the circuit rather than outward toward the world.

The harm of social media goes beyond its hold on attention, though. The platform also subjects the child to an ever-present observer: making every impulse potentially public and subject to others’ assessment. For Winnicott, the capacity for genuine desire develops only where a child is free from an evaluative gaze and can follow impulses that arise from her own center. Social media destroys that freedom. What forms in its absence is what Winnicott called the “false self” – a performing self, shaped by the reactions of others. When the emptiness beneath that performance can no longer be ignored, what surfaces is the anxiety of unreality: the distress of someone who has been going through the motions of a life without ever really inhabiting it.

At eight, Kaley posted a video of herself playing an online game as an otter character, singing in a put-on British accent: an act of pure play, entirely her own. Within a few years, a video shows her crying tears of joy at reaching 100 YouTube subscribers – and then, in the same breath, saying she looked fat. A decade later, she had given up her hobbies and old interests, stopped making friends, withdrawn from her family. She developed depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia. She began cutting herself. She had suicidal thoughts.

What I find most striking, reading Kaley’s testimony, is the totality of her collapse. In the space of a decade, a child playing freely became a teenager who wanted to stop living. The trial documented her decline, each symptom linked to social media use. But the standard account, which explains her suffering through social comparison and addiction, cannot explain what connects these symptoms and lies at their root. What I read in her story is the loss of something more fundamental: not just her self-regard, but her sense of herself as a desiring subject, whose curiosities and ambitions might have given her an identity beyond how she appears. Genuine desire requires a kind of self-forgetting: what Heidegger, Winnicott, and others have understood as the condition of authentic being – absorption in what one genuinely pursues. The platform made that impossible, and without that absorption, Kaley’s attention turned inward, and against herself.

Kaley is one of thousands of plaintiffs in this litigation, her story a window into a generation’s suffering. The young people I treat want to stop hurting themselves, starving themselves, measuring themselves against ideals that leave them feeling worthless. They want to feel less empty. But what lies beyond that pain – what might make them happy, what kind of life might be worth pursuing – has become, sadly, out of reach.

Last month’s settlement holds Meta accountable for deliberately addicting children to its platforms. This is a sign we are beginning to take that harm seriously. Still, helping these young people heal will require more than the sort of symptom management mostly on offer. It will involve understanding what has been lost, and the slow, patient work of creating the conditions in which genuine desire might, at last, come alive. That work has barely begun.