Educational teams often ask how to detect “screen addiction” in the young people they support. Yet clinical medicine recognises only one specific disorder, gaming disorder, included by the World Health Organization in its classification in 2018. For everything else, talking about addiction shifts the gaze from the suffering to the object. The useful markers are not hours of screen time: they are ruptures, in sleep, relationships, schooling, pleasure.
A word that brings relief
When a team asks me for tools to detect screen addiction, I first hear a legitimate worry: teenagers who spend nights on their phones, who no longer leave their rooms, who explode when someone touches the device. Calling this “addiction” brings relief, because the word provides a cause, a culprit and a course of action. This is what gives the prohibitionist current on screens its strength, whose logic I analysed in the articles Nuée d’écrans nuancés and Banning social media before 15: a simple solution provides immediate reassurance. The problem is that it describes poorly what is happening, and that detection based on a false description misguides action.
Only one recognised disorder, gaming disorder
In 2018, the World Health Organization included gaming disorder in the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases. Its criteria are demanding: impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities and interests, continuation of the behaviour despite negative consequences, all with marked impairment and a duration of at least twelve months as a general rule. There is no “screen disorder” or “social media addiction” in this classification: the scientific community debates the matter, precisely because the criteria of addiction (tolerance, withdrawal, loss of control) transpose poorly to practices as diverse as watching videos, chatting with friends or making images. As early as 2013, the report of the Académie des sciences, L’enfant et les écrans, to which Serge Tisseron contributed, rejected intrinsic dangerousness and called for differentiated support according to ages and uses. Saying this does not deny any suffering: it forces us to look for it in the right place.
Deficiency rather than excess
During a public meeting on digital parenting that I facilitated in 2023, the psychologist Vanessa Lalo quoted data from the ELFE cohort, which has been following thousands of French children since birth: around 56 minutes of screen time per day on average at age two, around an hour and a half at five and a half. Her reading: what is problematic in these figures is not primarily the duration, it is the lack of support, the child left alone in front of a stream, with no adult to watch with them, to name, to connect. She also insisted on a distinction that public debates ignore: passive use and interactive or creative use do not have the same effects, and “screens” in the singular do not exist. Her formula seems to me a good guiding thread for teams: we are not “facing screens”, we live “with screens”, and the educational question is that of the with.
Symptom and cause
The sociologist Jocelyn Lachance, who has been working since L’adolescence hypermoderne (Presses de l’Université Laval, 2011) on young people’s quest for autonomy, puts it bluntly: adolescent pathologies exist, but social networks do not create them. A teenager’s suffering is most often rooted in identity, family or social issues; the technical device is not its cause, it can amplify it, and it gives it a place where it becomes visible. Withdrawal into the screen is then a refuge, sometimes a self-medication of anxiety. The useful clinical question is not “how many hours?” but “what is this screen protecting them from?”. For teenagers in child protection, who carry heavy histories, this question changes everything: treating the “addiction” by removing the object amounts to removing the dressing without looking at the wound.
The markers that help
What should we look for, then? Ruptures, and cross-cutting ruptures, which are not measured in hours of screen time: durably disrupted sleep, disturbed eating, real-life relationships going out one after another, schooling coming apart, the disappearance of pleasure in everything that is not the screen, secrecy settling in around the uses. None of these signs says “the screen is the cause”; together, they say “this young person is not doing well”, and that is what calls for a response, educational and, if necessary, therapeutic. The best detection instrument remains the relationship: a teenager talks about their practices to an adult who does not judge them, and falls silent in front of an adult who despises them, as I developed in the article Not judging people’s digital practices. Taking a sincere interest in what a young person does on their phone, asking them to show you, to explain, is both the gesture that informs best and the first gesture of support.
