Are smartphones really destroying the mental health of a generation?
If you want to make your name in psychiatry, find a problem, identify a plausible one-factor solution, and then offer a big fix at low cost. And provided you can make at least some of the sums add up, even editors of academic journals will find it hard to resist. I was first offered this tongue-in-cheek advice on the threshold of a lifetime in academic psychiatry over four decades ago. But the idea of the one-factor solution has never been particularly attractive to me. After all, over the first half of the last century, the lure of a surgical solution to mental health ailments scarred the lives of tens of
