As social media becomes a central part of young people’s lives, concerns are growing about its impact on their mental health. Yet public debates and measures tend to treat adolescents as one homogeneous group. We frequently ignore the fact that social media use does not affect all young people in the same way – nor does it have the same impacts on their wellbeing.

In a recent chapter of the World Happiness Report 2026, published by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network in partnership with the University of Oxford, we have examined how problematic social media use relates to the wellbeing of adolescents from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

We looked at 43 countries spanning six broad regions – Anglo-Celtic, Caucasus-Black Sea, Central-Eastern Europe, Mediterranean, Nordic, and Western Europe – covering mainly European countries and their immediate neighbouring areas.

Using data from over 330,000 young people, we found a clear and consistent pattern: higher levels of problematic social media use – that is, compulsive or uncontrolled engagement with social media – are associated with poorer wellbeing.

Teenagers who report more problematic use tend to experience more psychological complaints, such as feeling low, nervous, irritable, or having difficulty sleeping. They also have lower life satisfaction, a measure of how positively they evaluate their lives as a whole.

This pattern appears across all countries in our study, but its strength varies from one country to another. It is particularly pronounced in Anglo-Celtic countries such as the UK and Ireland, while it is comparatively weaker in the Caucasus-Black Sea region.

Socioeconomic background matters

The story does not end with geography. Globally, teenagers from less advantaged backgrounds tend to be more vulnerable to the negative consequences of problematic social media use than their more advantaged peers.

This means socioeconomic status – the material and social resources available to a household, such as income and living conditions – actively shapes the risks and opportunities that young people experience as a result of online environments.

Interestingly, these inequalities are especially visible when we look at life satisfaction. Differences between socioeconomic groups are smaller when it comes to psychological complaints, but much clearer and more consistent for how adolescents evaluate their lives overall.

One likely reason is that life satisfaction is more sensitive to social comparisons. Social media exposes young people to constant benchmarks – what others have, do, and achieve – which can amplify differences in perceived opportunities and resources.

At the same time, these patterns are not identical everywhere. For instance, socioeconomic differences in psychological complaints tend to be modest in most regions including continental European countries such as France, Austria or Belgium, but are more clearly observed in Anglo-Celtic countries such as Scotland and Wales.

In contrast, socioeconomic gaps in life satisfaction appear across most regions, although they tend to be weaker in Mediterranean countries such as Italy, Cyprus and Greece.

A growing problem

We also examined how these patterns have evolved over time. Between 2018 and 2022, the link between problematic social media use and poor adolescent wellbeing became stronger.

This suggests that the risks linked to problematic use may have intensified in recent years, possibly reflecting the growing role of digital technologies in young people’s daily lives, particularly during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.

Importantly, this intensification has affected teenagers across socioeconomic groups in broadly similar ways in most regions. In other words, while inequalities remain they have not widened over this period.

Leer más: Social media addiction disrupts the sleep, moods and social activities of teens and young adults

No one-size-fits-all solution

While public debates about social media and mental health often treat adolescents as a single demographic group, our results show a more complex reality. Problematic social media use is linked to poorer wellbeing across countries, but its effects are shaped by social realities. They vary depending on where young people live and what resources are available to them.

Not all teenagers experience the digital world in the same way, and not all are equally equipped to cope with its pressures. Recognising this is essential for designing policies that are not only effective, but also equitable, ensuring that interventions reach those adolescents who are most vulnerable to digital risks.

A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

Roger Fernandez-Urbano receives funding from the Spanish Government’s Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the State Research Agency through Ramón y Cajal (RYC) grant. Roger is a member of the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS).

Maria Rubio-Cabañez's involvement in this research was supported by the DIGINEQ (Digital Time Use, Adolescent Well-Being and Social Inequalities) project (Grant agreement ID: 101089233), funded by the European Research Council Consolidator Grant.

Pablo Gracia's involvement in this research was supported by the DIGINEQ (Digital Time Use, Adolescent Well-Being and Social Inequalities) project (Grant agreement ID: 101089233), funded by the European Research Council Consolidator Grant.

Rock paintings are found throughout Zimbabwe. They were made during the last 10,000 years by hunter gatherer groups and later by farming communities.

These came to the attention of the ERC Artsoundscapes project, based in Spain, in 2021. The project brings together experts in archaeology, ethnography, psychology and acoustic engineering to explore how humans understood sound in prehistoric times. Our team has studied some of the rock art of South Africa in which dance scenes are depicted, and we have begun work on documenting and analysing similar rock art in Zimbabwe.

Read more: Dance scenes in South African rock art: a closer look at ritual, music and movement

Zimbabwe’s rock paintings are concentrated in the country’s eastern provinces, which is where we’ve focused so far. More can be found in the Matobo World Heritage Cultural Landscape in Matabeleland South, which will be the focus of future study.

We have published an article describing dance scenes in this rock art and comparing them with information from ethnographic sources to understand what kinds of dances they depict. The ethnographic research was done by anthropologists and focused on hunter gatherer groups in the broader southern African region (Botswana and Namibia).

We found that all the kinds of dances that have been described in living cultures – dances for ritual, entertainment or special circumstances – are depicted in Zimbabwe’s rock art. But ritual is a central theme.

This points to the need to refine our classification of rock art scenes. We’ve been using features like the body posture of depicted figures to classify a scene as a dance. But ritual dances often involve going into a trance state – and this alters a person’s ability to control their body, move in synchrony with other people and follow “rules” of a dance. Therefore, it may be necessary to reconsider whether some rock art scenes in Zimbabwe, and in the whole of southern Africa, depict dances or not.

Here we will discuss some examples of the rock art in Zimbabwe and explain how we categorised them.

Analytical method

We reviewed published works by archaeology researchers such as the late Peter Garlake and university professor Ancila Nhamo. We also used online resources, including the British Museum online collection by rock art photographer and author David Coulson, which features rock art from Zimbabwe and other southern African countries.

Our inquiry aimed to determine whether all dances that have been recognised ethnographically, in living people, in Zimbabwe as well as in other countries of southern Africa, are also represented in Zimbabwe’s rock art.

We analysed the scenes by applying six attributes that have proved useful in studies in other parts of the world, such as the Middle East and the western Mediterranean. The attributes are divided into those related to the dancers themselves and those related to the type of dance. They are:

• dancers’ body posture (including bent figures, outstretched arms and flexed legs)

• items they hold, such as sticks, rattles, or headgear

• interaction between dancers

• evidence of synchrony

• direction of movement

• gender of the figures represented.

Dance scenes in Zimbabwe rock art

Using these attributes, we can say that a scene such as this one found at Lake Chivero is a dance because it has several men all wearing aprons, displaying the same body posture, and positioned in synchrony with outstretched arms.

Yet, in other scenes we encountered unexpected problems with the second group of attributes (type of dance). Those were designed to analyse dance scenes in other parts of the world with different belief systems. But they are not always valid when dancers engage in trance dances.

One example of this type of scene that does not follow the norm is found at a site called Chivhu. A series of therianthropes (figures with both human and animal features) were painted associated with a large snake bearing two animal heads. In the scene we analysed there, the interaction between dancers is irregular, their movements are not synchronised, and the direction of the dance is not homogeneous, as would be expected in a regular dance. But regular interaction, synchronisation and uniform direction are simply not possible when dancers are in an altered state of consciousness. So, this scene might not look like a dance but it probably is one, based on what we know from studies of living people in cultures associated with the makers of the rock art.

Other dances recognised ethnographically as being of ritual character are initiation dances. An example of a dancing scene which may indicate a boys’ initiation dance can be found at a rocky outcrop in Glen Norah, Harare. American anthropologist Lorna Marshall, who undertook fieldwork among the !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, described how the !Kung boys from Nyae Nyae in Namibia in the 1950s sometimes bent their upper bodies into an almost right-angle posture while dancing. The dancers in the painted scene are accompanied by other men who are not participating in the dance. These kinds of initiation dances are not documented or practised in Zimbabwe, however. So although the painted scene looks like an initiation dance, it probably isn’t one.

Rock art may also depict eland dances, the girls’ initiation dance. For example, dancing scenes depicting only women that may be interpreted as eland dances are found in Chipinge and Mudadi in Zimbabwe’s Chivi district.

The Makonde dance from Mashonaland West, which features more than 30 performers, is not easy to interpret. It is not clear whether this represents a large dance scene or if the dancers can be divided into different groups. Some individuals are clapping, while others are dancing, which may indicate the presence of trance dancers (group labelled b). Additionally, there are female dancers with tufts on their legs and wearing back aprons (group labelled a). These could be dancing for entertainment, because in reality for an eland dance (a ritual) they would probably remove the aprons.

Categorising certain dances can be challenging, and some may have been performed purely for entertainment purposes. For example, there is a dancing scene at Charewa that depicts women, men, and possibly children participating. We propose that this could represent an entertainment dance or a dance in some particular circumstance where everyone joined in.

Other elements emerging from the analysis of the dance scenes found in Zimbabwean rock art include the presence of musical instruments and a variety of artefacts associated with the dancers. Hand rattles frequently appear in dancing scenes and have been recognised as the most depicted musical instruments in Zimbabwean rock art, as we’ve discussed in an article about musical instrument representations.

Dancers are sometimes depicted with dancing sticks or other accessories, not only rattles. For instance, some figures appear to be holding round discs that are difficult to identify at Chikupu.

Moreover, dancers may be adorned with beads, as observed at Charewa Panel 2, and often wear distinctive headgear, typically resembling antennae, which may symbolise feathers as described in ethnographic accounts.

It’s important to accurately identify and describe these scenes. Our analysis highlights the valuable information that can be gleaned from close examination of the depictions, as well as from the use of ethnohistorical sources related to dance.

Margarita Díaz-Andreu received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme for the ERC Artsoundscapes project (Grant Agreement No. 787842) . Margarita Díaz-Andreu is affiliated with ICREA and the University of Barcelona.

Joshua Kumbani does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

In June 2018 I had the opportunity to visit Minsk, the capital of Belarus. In a large bookshop in the city centre – beneath the inquisitorial gaze of the ever-present portraits of the dictator Alexander Lukashenko – I asked the bookseller for one of the volumes of Svetlana Alexievich’s collected works. The Russian publisher Vremya had reissued them after the author was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015.

But the newest Russian edition of The Unwomanly Face of War – the Alexievich book I had just translated into Catalan – was not on the shelves. Instead, to my surprise, the bookseller pulled a copy out from under the counter. The complete works of Belarus’s only Nobel laureate were being kept out of sight from Belarusian readers. Her books had to be requested as though they were exclusive items – or worse, forbidden or dangerous goods.

Perhaps they turned a blind eye in my case because I was a foreigner, but it is not a stretch to think that local readers who bought Alexievich’s works at the time may well have found their names added directly to some State register, much like how Russia monitors its citizens’ internet searches today. And I say “at the time” here because I have my doubts as to whether Alexievich’s books are still available in bookshops in her own country today.

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That brief scene seemed to encapsulate the increasingly uncomfortable status Alexievich’s books had acquired in Belarus and across the post-Soviet world. Indeed, I had a similar experience in Russia just three months after my visit to Minsk, when I found myself in Moscow for a translation congress. I decided to repeat my Alexievich experiment in another large bookshop, this time on the city’s main thoroughfare of Tverskaya Street.

There, the collected works were not hidden from view but rather placed beyond the customer’s reach. High up on a shelf, nearly touching the ceiling, I spotted the volume I was looking for: Voices from Chernobyl. I asked the bookseller how I was supposed to get up there. She replied with blunt discourtesy: “You’ll find a ladder somewhere.”

And sure enough, I did find one.

Prayer and voices

2026 marks forty years since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, one of the many factors that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. On this bleak anniversary, it is worth sketching the origins of the critical disdain Alexievich has faced in her home country and in Russia, particularly in connection with Voices from Chernobyl.

Svetlana Alexievich’s books have been translated into 52 languages and published in 55 countries. The first English version of Voices from Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future was translated by Antonina W Bouis and published in London by Aurum Press in 1999. The book was also released in a new translation by Keith Gessen in 2005 by Dalkey Archive Press, in the US, titled Voices from Chernobyl: the Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. The most recent English translation, by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait, was published by Penguin Books in 2016 under the title Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future.

From her exile in Berlin, Alexievich herself declared recently: “I fear that today every modern person should know something about the atom and its dangers”. For that reason, she still recommends Voices from Chernobyl as an entry point into her literary universe.

Leer más: Chernobyl at 40: the lies, the loss and why we can’t let go

A first reading of Alexievich

The original version of the book appeared in the first issue of the Russian journal Friendship of Peoples (Дружба народов) in 1997, where it was recognised as one of the ten most outstanding contributions of the year – an endorsement that granted it immediate literary legitimacy.

That same year, the poet and critic Valery Lipnevich devoted a long review to the book in one of the most influential Russian literary journals of the twentieth century, The New World (Новый мир). Under the title Farewell to Eternity, the review interpreted the work as a meditation on the collapse of the scientific and moral progress of Homo sovieticus, highlighting Alexievich’s decision not to “write, but record, document” a polyphony of voices.

Lipnevich wrote:

“In the case of Svetlana Alexievich, we are faced with a radically new phenomenon. Documentary writing as such is not new, but up to now we have mostly read an ideologised documentary prose – writing disguised as documentary that had little interest in reality itself. What Alexievich is doing today might be called a new literature of fact. It is glasnost and social openness that have made her books possible. They convey the voice of the people as it is, without embellishment.”

Between 1997 and 1999, reviews largely followed this line. They emphasised the ethical and testimonial nature of her work, placing it within the tradition of Russian documentary prose – alongside figures such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin – while also underlining the high literary quality of her documentary project. The liberalising post-Soviet spirit of the wild nineties seemed to accompany the reception of Alexievich’s work.

Leer más: How the image of a besieged and victimized Russia came to be so ingrained in the country’s psyche

Reception after the 2000s

From the publication of her first book during perestroika – 1985’s The Unwomanly Face of War – the critical narrative surrounding Alexievich already carried ideological and political accusations that would come to dominate her reception from the 2000s onward.

It was then that allegations of Russophobia and anti-Soviet sentiment proliferated online and in reader reviews. Her books were increasingly labelled as polemics, and her literary method itself came under attack – precisely because it rests on a constellation of complementary and sometimes contradictory perceptions of some of the most profound collective traumas of homo sovieticus.

The real turning point, however, came with Alexievich’s Nobel Prize and acceptance lecture. The international visibility of an author who questioned the Kremlin’s narratives of national exaltation did not go unnoticed. Matters worsened further with HBO’s 2019 Chernobyl miniseries.

Leer más: Chernobyl at 40: Secret Stasi files reveal extent of Soviet misinformation campaign over nuclear disaster

As reported by the independent outlet Meduza, Kremlin-aligned media (including Argumenty i Fakty, Express-Gazeta, Rossiyskaya Gazeta and Komsomolskaya Pravda, among others) seized on the series’ release to launch furious attacks, not only against the show but also against Alexievich and Voices from Chernobyl, from which the series had drawn several narrative threads.

The revision of history

The closure of independent media and sites of historical memory, the lack of freedom of expression and assembly, the rehabilitation of the Soviet past (Stalin and the Gulag included), and the growing suspicion towards critical, non-heroic narratives of national history have shaped a context in which Voices from Chernobyl and Alexievich’s other books are no longer read as multifaceted, humanistic literary contributions. Instead, they have become simply “awkward” texts – hard to stomach and best kept at a distance.

In April 2024, Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision in Education and Science opened an investigation following the appearance of an excerpt from Voices from Chernobyl on an online platform used to prepare for the Russian university entrance exam. Nina Ostanina, chair of the Duma Committee for the Protection of the Family, denounced Alexievich’s works as being “saturated with hatred for Russia and Russian culture”.

It may not be long before her work is entirely banned. For now, her texts are merely disguised: her books hidden, removed from libraries, or placed on shelves that are almost impossible to reach.

One can only hope there is still a ladder somewhere…

A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

Miquel Cabal Guarro is a member of PEN Català, the Association of Catalan Language Writers, and the European Council of Literary Translators' Associations.

According to recent data from the Global Bipolar Cohort, only 29% of people with bipolar disorder are prescribed lithium. Despite being the “gold standard” for treating this mental health condition, we often prioritise perceptions over scientific reality, and neglect the best available treatment.

Lithium is not some complex molecule synthesised in a state-of-the-art laboratory. It is just an element, the third in the periodic table, and ever since the Australian psychiatrist John Cade discovered its therapeutic properties in 1949, it has maintained a relevance that no other psychotropic drug has been able to match.

This longevity is not a relic of the past, but a reflection of its clinical robustness. Despite decades of research and the constant emergence of new drugs, no alternative has shown comparable efficacy in the long-term prevention of manic and depressive episodes in bipolar disorder.

According to a review published in 2024, lithium is still “the mainstay treatment of mood disorders in general and in bipolar disorder specifically”. It is also the benchmark against which all other treatment options are compared, both for stabilising mood and reducing the risk of relapse.

It is the only mood stabiliser with proven efficacy in treating mania and depression, as well as in preventing relapses. Furthermore, recent studies confirm that it may also have neuroprotective properties, from the modulation of cellular pathways involved in neural plasticity to potential effects in preventing mild cognitive impairment and dementia.

These characteristics explain why international guidelines still rank it as the first-line treatment for bipolar disorder. A consensus published in 2025 stated that it should be prescribed more frequently, contrary to the unfounded reservations that still persist in clinical practice.

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Suicide reduction

Above all, there is one aspect that sets lithium apart from other psychopharmaceutical drugs: its ability to reduce the risk of suicide. No other medication has demonstrated such a consistently protective effect.

A 2024 review highlighted that, despite the methodological difficulties in studying this statistically rare event, the body of evidence from clinical trials, observational studies and meta-analyses all points in the same direction: lithium reduces mortality and suicide attempts.

This is likely due to its ability to reduce impulsivity, stabilise extreme mood swings and prevent depressive relapses, all of which create the moments of greatest risk.

Beyond episodic treatment

Current research is also looking into lithium’s ability to alter the course of bipolar disorder. Not only does it stop episodes, but it also protects the brain, and evidence suggests that, unlike some antipsychotics, it improves brain connectivity and preserves verbal fluency.

In fact, there is very interesting data suggesting that it could reduce the risk of dementia by up to 50%. Even residual levels in drinking water appear to have a protective effect at a population level. Lithium is, in short, a molecule with exceptional neuroprotective potential.

But the neuroprotective effects do not stop there. Recent studies also suggest that lithium stimulates the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a protein essential for neuronal survival and growth that is often reduced in patients with bipolar disorder.

In other words, it doesn’t just prevent the brain from deteriorating – it actively helps it to heal.

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Blood monitoring and ‘precision medicine’

It is often argued that the need for blood tests to monitor lithium levels (the optimal therapeutic range is 0.6-0.8 millimoles per litre) is an inconvenience. However, from a rigorous clinical perspective, this monitoring is a safeguard, not a risk. It is what allows the dose to be adjusted to the exact biology of each patient, a form of “precision medicine” that we were already practising long before the term became fashionable.

We should also remember that many commonly used medicines – from anticoagulants to immunosuppressants – require the same kind of laboratory monitoring, yet they are not considered dangerous for that reason.

What lithium management requires is not fear, but rigour. So why is it prescribed less often? The answer is complex. It is partly due to pressure from the pharmaceutical industry to promote new, patentable molecules – lithium, being a natural element, cannot be patented. There is also a degree of clinical reluctance due to its narrow therapeutic window – it needs to be carefully controlled to ensure a safe yet effective dose.

However, international guidelines are clear: lithium should be the first choice. We cannot overlook it in favour of less effective alternatives simply because they appear more modern. This kind of mistake should not influence clinical practice.

Newer is not always better

Good psychopharmacology is not a question of chasing the latest developments, but of using the most appropriate treatment for each individual at every stage of their illness.

Lithium has a proven track record that spans decades, across areas that no other mood stabiliser can address simultaneously. It controls manic and depressive episodes, prevents suicide, and provides active neuroprotection. Three areas, in one single drug.

This does not mean it is right for absolutely everyone. Good psychopharmacology should always push back against fads and dogma alike, but discarding lithium’s use without ever seriously considering it deprives patients of an option that is, according to the evidence, categorically the best therapeutic option.

Our challenge today is not to reinvent the wheel, but to understand how best to use the therapeutic tools we already have. A drug doesn’t become outdated just because time has passed; it becomes outdated when new evidence emerges and supersedes it. In the case of lithium, new evidence only confirms its value.

A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

Julia E. Marquez Arrico no recibe salario, ni ejerce labores de consultoría, ni posee acciones, ni recibe financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y ha declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado.