The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will look to add child psychologists to its staff to advise its efforts on regulating the internet. Democratic Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya said the FTC plans to add a psychologist to its staff by next fall, if not sooner, and said he is embarrassed he hasn’t previously focused on how the media impacts children.
The FTC currently isn’t able to adequately look into allegations that the internet is causing mental health problems in children because the commission doesn’t have any full-time experts in psychology on staff, Bedoya told The Record on Monday. He says FTC Chair Lina Khan is on board with the plan and is part of a larger effort to hold media outlets accountable for the effect they have on kids and teens.
“Our plan is to hire one or more child psychologists to help us assess the mental health impacts of what children and young people do online,” FTC spokesperson Douglas Farrar told CNBC Monday. “We are currently exploring the next steps including how many to hire and when.”
The FTC has been presented with research that claims the internet is causing depressive symptoms in children, but Bedoya says he doesn’t have the expertise to make a sound judgment for whether the child is simply sad or if there is a correlation between internet use and mental health harm.
The people hired would most likely be psychological scientists or social psychologists who can research children’s symptoms rather than evaluate them in a clinical setting, according to Bedoya. He says he hopes to grow the number of psychologists on staff, but first, he is meeting with experts and exploring different configurations before coming to a hiring decision.
“What we want in this first tranche of experts is what some people call psychological scientists and what other people call social psychologists,” Bedoya told The Record. “These are people who are conducting research and evaluating research to get a sense of population-level effects from certain conduct. We want people who are running econometric studies, and peer-reviewed research to get a sense of the broad trends.”
Bedoya’s comments come after he released prepared remarks in February saying the FTC needs in-house psychologists to help evaluate all alleged mental health harms in children. He says it’s important to do more to protect young people and learn the difference between something that should raise red flags with the FTC versus a child’s existing emotional and mental health.
“… There’s a difference between a teenager being ‘emotional’ and a teenager suffering from depression,” Bedoya said. “There’s a difference between a nervous child and a child suffering from anxiety. There is a difference between a kid who is down on herself and a kid who is contemplating suicide. But here is where it gets hard. Because right now, if we want someone to help us understand that difference, we need to go through the process of hiring outside experts.”
