Hypnotherapy for Social Media Addiction?

My social media channels alerted me to this study today, a research paper examining the effectiveness of “hypnotic-oriented counselling” on social media addiction.

It’s a topic that seems constantly in the news (the addiction, not hypnotherapy) with supposedly addicted young people wasting their lives glued to small screens and constantly worrying about their online reputation. My personal view, which is totally unsubstantiated by any sort of research that I’m aware of, is that social media addiction is a middle-aged problem. People like me who haven’t grown up with social media platforms are, I believe, far more likely to have trouble developing the coping mechanisms needed to moderate use.

We are also far more likely to moan about it! After all, what generation of middle-aged people hasn’t found itself moaning about the society-destroying effects of new things and the fecklessness of youth? If you doubt me, have a look at the moral panic that ensued in 18th England when that insidious form of literature “the novel” became popular.

On the positive side, the study includes a detailed description of the counselling intervention, with the participants undergoing five sessions of hypnotherapeutic counselling. The counselling sessions are described in detail unusual for a paper on hypnotherapy with the sessions, after the initial introduction session, focusing on enhancing motivation, emotional release, conflict resolution and empowerment.

The paper also includes a rigorous methodological design for the evaluation of the intervention and a comprehensive analysis of the results, supported by qualitative data and the participants’ qualitative feedback with lots tables and data for stats nerds like me.

 But, and I think it’s a big but, the sample size is very small (2), which severely limits how much one can generalise from its findings, and there’s no control group.

I’m also unsure about its reliance on self-reported measures for social media addiction. There’s a real danger of this introducing social desirability bias (where the participants may under report their social media usage or its impact to appear in a better light) and/or recall bias (where they do not accurately remember their social media usage).

 It would be good to see future research include a larger and more diverse sample size, a control group, and more objective measures of social media use and intervention success.

 But for now, on the evidence of this paper, I think this is very much case unproven.