Dr Catherine Sebastian

Yeah, so Wellcome's one of the largest global funders of mental health research.

And the digital world is a massive part of everyday life for young people.

So we actually got involved in this space, funding the trial that Amy talked about, because we really wanted to move the evidence beyond the associational evidence that you've discussed today.

whereby it's very hard to know whether social media is actually causal for mental health problems, and really try and unpick whether social media restriction is something that could actually help young people.

Yeah, it's a really good question.

And I think that's why there's still tremendous value in studies like the IRL trial, which are the gold standard randomised control trial and have a control condition.

So you can have that comparison.

Once a ban comes in for the UK as a whole, you won't be able to have that nice control design.

But there are other methods that you can use to try and infer what the effects of the ban might be.

And so, for example, we might fund cohort studies which follow up thousands of young people over time.

Many of them have got decades worth of data from young people, often from birth.

And we would fund them to collect baseline mental health measures before the ban is implemented and then follow up young people over time.

And then it's not ideal for causality because there isn't a control condition, but you can use modelling techniques to control for variables and look at pathways to understand not only if the ban is effective, but if so, why that might be.

So you can look at variables that might be of interest to mental health, like sleep.

So, for example, is the ban on social media effective?

meaning that young people are sleeping more, are they interacting with their friends more?

So for us, it's really important that we understand, is the ban effective?

Is it acting as it's intended?

Are there in fact any unintended consequences that are harmful to young people?

But also if it is effective, what are the mechanisms or pathways by which it might be having an effect?