It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, March 19, 2026
Taking the long view on teen social media ban impacts
Mental and physical health, school performance and digital literacy should also be considered
Professor Bridianne O’Dea, Flinders University Little Heroes Professor in Child and Adolescent Mental Health at the Flinders Institute for Mental Health and Wellbeing (FIMHWell),
Australia’s new ban on social media for under-16s should be judge on much more than whether adolescents stay offline, researchers say.
Experts from Flinders University say success of the policy should be measured by its impact on young people’s mental health, school performance, digital literacy, and how they spend their time outside of social media.
They also warn that restricting access may have limited impact unless social media platforms themselves are required to build safer environments to prevent young users from accessing harmful content.
Australia introduced a world-first policy in December last year, preventing children under 16 from holding accounts on major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X and YouTube.
While supporters argue the policy will protect young people from harmful content and excessive screen use, critics have raised concerns about enforcement challenges and privacy issues.
In new commentary published in the journal The Lancet Regional Health - Western Pacific, experts outline key considerations for evaluation of the legislation and ensuring it delivers long-term benefits for young people.
– including the need for alternative safe and secure avenues to reach and communicate with this demographic outside popular social media channels.
Professor Bridianne O’Dea, Flinders University Little Heroes Professor in Child and Adolescent Mental Health at the Flinders Institute for Mental Health and Wellbeing (FIMHWell), says researchers are working to assess the policy’s real-world effects.
“We shouldn’t only be asking whether teenagers are using social media less,” says Professor O’Dea. “We also need to understand what changes in their lives as a result.
“Are they sleeping better? Are their friendships developing? Are there improvements in their mental health and wellbeing?”
Flinders University experts in emerging technologies, Professor Daniel King and Dr Marcela Radunz are leading South Australia’s evaluation of the ban – and directly asking young people about how the ban is affecting them.
“Monitoring the success of the ban is critical, because other countries are looking to introduce similar legislation,” says Dr Radunz, a research fellow in clinical psychology.
“Careful evaluation will help us understand what works, what doesn’t, and how to reduce potential harms through additional evidence-based strategies.”
The researchers also warn that the ban may create new challenges for organisations that use social media to reach young people, including mental health services and research studies.
“The social media age restriction creates an opportunity to establish broader standards for digital platforms that could benefit all users,” they say.
“Social media has become one of the main ways researchers and support services connect with teenagers,” says Professor O’Dea.
“Access changes to social media means we need new ways to reach young people and make sure their voices are still heard.”
Professor O’Dea says the policy creates an opportunity to develop new systems for involving adolescents in research, such as a national research registry for young people.
“Adolescents are often under-represented in research, yet the policies being developed directly affect them,” she says.
“This could be the time to build better ways of engaging teens and ensuring their perspectives shape future policy and services.”
Acknowledgements: The work is supported by National Health and Medical Research Council Medical Research Future Fund Investigator Grant (MRF1197249 and GNT2007731) and the Channel 7 Children’s Research Foundation.
MONTREAL, Quebec, CANADA, 17 March 2026 – Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University, Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Therapeutics for Mental Health, Staff Psychiatrist at the McGill University Health Center (MUHC), and Senior Scientist, Brain Repair and Integrative Neuroscience Programat the Research Institute of the MUHC, and President-Elect of the Collegium Internationale of Neuropsychopharmacology (CINP), has issued an unambiguous challenge to the global drug-development system, warning that promising treatments for mental illness are failing to reach patients not because the science is flawed but because venture capital and profit motive govern which compounds advance through clinical trials. Her warning appears in a new Genomic Press Interview published in Brain Medicine.
"My greatest fear concerns the future of psychopharmacology and drug discovery," Dr. Gobbi states in the interview, "not because the science is failing, but because a greedy system oversees innovation today." She describes a landscape in which public funding can sustain early academic research, but the more expensive steps, from toxicology to first-in-human trials, depend on private investment that is guided by margin expectations rather than medical need. "We may lose good, non-expensive treatments because a greedy, capitalistic system controls which drug will finally be brought to market."
A Career Built on Bedside Questions
Dr. Gobbi grew up in a book-filled house in central Italy, the granddaughter of a man who died under Allied bombing in March 1945 after writing from a German prison to insist that his children receive the education he himself had been denied. That inheritance, part moral conviction and part intellectual hunger, runs as a thread through everything she has since done. At fourteen she put down comic books and picked up Freud. In high school she read about Rita Levi-Montalcini and the discovery of nerve growth factor, and understood that the brain was not fixed but plastic, a revelation that pointed her toward medicine. By twenty, during training in Rome, she had encountered translational research, the practice of moving continuously between laboratory bench and clinical ward, and found that she could not relinquish either world.
The path to independence was neither smooth nor linear. In Italy during the 1990s, academic positions were controlled by senior professors acting as gatekeepers, and Dr. Gobbi spent time working at a private psychiatric hospital in a small central-Italian town, applying to PhD programs and genuinely unsure whether she would ever gain entry to research. The turning point arrived on the evening of January 29, 1996, in the form of a telephone call. She was invited to sit a PhD entrance examination in Cagliari, in Sardinia, the following morning. She boarded a plane at eleven that night. At eight the next morning she sat the exam, and she won. That examination opened the door to work with Professor Gianluigi Gessa, a neuroscientist known for landmark contributions to the neurobiology of dopamine and addiction. Two years later, at a Biological Psychiatry meeting in Nice, a chance conversation with Professor Pierre Blier led to an invitation to join his laboratory at McGill. That single year in Montreal became more than two decades.
From Cannabis and Anhedonia to Melatonin and Psychedelics
The clinical observation that drives her best-known research line is almost painfully simple. In the early 2000s, she kept seeing adolescents and young adults who smoked cannabis and who, in the years that followed, developed depression marked by profound anhedonia. The bedside pattern became a bench question. In 2007 her laboratory reported one of the first links between cannabinoids, serotonin systems, and depression-related phenotypes. In 2010, animal-model studies demonstrated that adolescent cannabis exposure could increase vulnerability to later depressive-like outcomes. By 2019, supporting evidence had emerged in human cohorts. This body of work has now accumulated more than 1,700 citations and contributed directly to public-health decisions in Quebec. Dr. Gobbi also testified as an expert witness before the Canadian Senate and the Ministries of Health and Justice in Quebec on cannabis policy, contributing to legislation raising the legal age for cannabis access and to the regulation of cannabis advertising.
A second major research program, running in parallel since 2006, has focused on the melatonin MT2 receptor, a target that was poorly understood when her group began. Her laboratory contributed to defining MT2 receptor localization and elucidated its specific role in restorative NREM sleep and neuropathic pain. An MT2-selective partial agonist, a first-in-class candidate, is now moving from early discovery toward clinical development. "I have learned that in science, the projects that take the longest are often those that yield the most meaningful results," she observes in the interview. Her laboratory began investigating psychedelics in 2013, before the contemporary wave of clinical trials brought the field to prominence, characterizing the anxiolytic and prosocial effects of LSD in preclinical models and beginning to identify underlying molecular mechanisms including mTORC1 signaling. That work is now extending to psilocybin, DMT, and 5-MeO-DMT, while new clinical studies aim to identify objective neurophysiological biomarkers of psychedelic action in humans.
The Hidden Tax on Women in Science
Dr. Gobbi does not confine her scrutiny to drug-development economics. She speaks with notable directness about gender inequality in academic science, describing both overt harassment and a quieter structural erosion: unequal access to administrative support, diversion toward low-visibility service work, and a conference-invitation culture that disadvantages researchers who carry disproportionate caregiving burdens. "This is the cause that fires me up the most," she states, "changing the structure of our scientific culture so excellence is recognized without imposing an additional, hidden tax on women." In her current role as President-Elect of the CINP, the organization whose presidency she will hold as its first woman in the organization's 70-year history, she has heard such accounts repeatedly from accomplished women who have been isolated, evaluated inconsistently, or simply not invited to the table.
The Letter and the Paddleboard
There is a letter from Dr. Gobbi's mother, written before her death from glioblastoma in 2000, that she names as her most treasured possession. It is the kind of detail that resists elaboration, so this account will leave it alone. What she says about happiness is perhaps more useful to science journalism: her happiest moments have occurred in those rare instants in research when data suddenly align and something obscure becomes clear, "the feeling that nature has briefly lifted a corner of the veil, and that an experiment is no longer just results on a page but a story that finally makes sense." When she disconnects entirely, in summer, she paddles on the Adriatic Sea. In Quebec she skis in spring, when the light softens. Winter skiing here, she notes in the interview, is simply too cold.
Asked what she would change about herself, Dr. Gobbi does not cite a scientific limitation. She wishes she had sought mentorship and leadership education earlier. She began her career as an assistant professor without a mentor and without foundational training in management, grant-writing, or conflict resolution. The regret is characteristic: it is not personal but structural, a comment about what academic systems fail to provide rather than about what she personally lacks. Her life philosophy, offered at the interview's close, is unadorned: "Do your best, stay true to what matters, and trust what comes."
Dr. Gabriella Gobbi's Genomic Press interview is part of a larger series called Innovators and Ideas that highlights the people behind today's most influential scientific breakthroughs. Each interview in the series offers a blend of cutting-edge research and personal reflections, providing readers with a comprehensive view of the scientists shaping the future. By combining a focus on professional achievements with personal insights, this interview style invites a richer narrative that both engages and educates readers. This format provides an ideal starting point for profiles that explore the scientist's impact on the field, while also touching on broader human themes. More information on the research leaders and rising stars featured in our Innovators and Ideas – Genomic Press Interview series can be found on our interview website: https://interviews.genomicpress.com/.
The Genomic Press Interview in Brain Medicine titled “Gabriella Gobbi: Embracing psychiatry from bench to bedside,” is freely available via Open Access, starting on 17 March 2026 in Brain Medicine at the following hyperlink: https://doi.org/10.61373/bm026k.0015.
About Brain Medicine: Brain Medicine (ISSN: 2997-2639, online and 2997-2647, print) is a peer-reviewed medical research journal published by Genomic Press, New York. Brain Medicine is a new home for the cross-disciplinary pathway from innovation in fundamental neuroscience to translational initiatives in brain medicine. The journal’s scope includes the underlying science, causes, outcomes, treatments, and societal impact of brain disorders, across all clinical disciplines and their interface.
LA JOLLA, California, USA, 17 March 2026 — A first-generation college student who once needed research stipends to pay rent has spent the last decade building the infrastructure to ensure others do not face the same calculus. Dr. Christian Cazares, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, grew up in Calexico, California, a border town where more than eighty percent of his schoolmates qualified for the free lunch program. In a new interview published today in the Genomic Press journal Brain Medicine, Dr. Cazares speaks with unusual candor about the financial, linguistic, and geographic barriers that shaped his trajectory, and about what he has done, systematically, to dismantle them.
A Zip Code That Determines Outcomes
The defining pivot in Dr. Cazares’ research came not from a laboratory result but from a family visit. His nephew, who has autism spectrum disorder and lives in Calexico, was hours away from the nearest specialists. The burden of time, travel, and cost that his family endured to access healthcare services made something abstract suddenly steer his research vision.
“The burdens of time, travel, and cost that my family endured just to access basic services made clear to me how much the zip code you are born in determines outcomes,” Dr. Cazares said.
That recognition led him to the laboratory of Dr. Bradley Voytek, whose work on extracting physiologically meaningful measures from scalp EEG offered something rare: a method that is portable, affordable, and does not require proximity to a major medical center. The choice was both scientific and moral. EEG is the instrument; equity is the ambition.
Biomarkers Built to Travel
Dr. Cazares is now pursuing three interconnected research directions. He is establishing correspondence between patient EEG and cortical organoid activity, comparing signals from children with autism to organoids derived from those same patients. He is also identifying transcriptomic signatures associated with aberrant electrophysiological signals in a mouse model of Rett syndrome through single-nucleus RNA sequencing. A third line of inquiry links cortical electrophysiology to innate and reflexive behaviors in patients with intellectual disabilities who cannot complete complex laboratory tasks.
“I envision a future in which a patient’s EEG and clinical assessments guide high-throughput screening of personalized therapeutics in brain organoids derived from that patient,” he said. “Most importantly, because EEG is non-invasive, portable, and inexpensive, I hope these biomarkers can someday reach underserved communities far from major medical centers, reducing the disparities that delayed my own nephew’s diagnosis.”
Removing the Gatekeepers
Dr. Cazares co-founded Colors of the Brain in 2016 as a first-year graduate student, alongside three colleagues, before he had even passed his qualifying examination. The nonprofit has raised and managed over two hundred thirty thousand dollars, supported five cohorts of scholars, and produced graduates now enrolled in doctoral programs and leading the organization themselves. The program offers the highest stipends among UCSD summer undergraduate research programs, because unpaid research experiences favor students who can afford to work for free.
Around the same period, Dr. Cazares served as student chair of his graduate program’s executive committee and advocated for the removal of the GRE requirement from graduate admissions at UCSD, presenting research on the test’s inability to predict student outcomes and its documented harm to low-income applicants. The committee agreed. The year was 2018, before the broader movement to drop the GRE had gained national momentum.
“One financial barrier that I think should continue to be scrutinized is the use of standardized tests like the GRE as gatekeepers to higher education,” he said.
Language as the Last Wall
Language, Dr. Cazares argues, is inseparable from class when science is concerned. Around eighty percent of journals are published in English, and scientific journalism worldwide depends heavily on English-only sources. He founded BrainBorders to provide bilingual neuroscience education in Calexico and nearby cities. He organized a Spanish-language workshop at the Society for Neuroscience in 2025, and he is preparing a workshop conducted entirely in Spanish on his postdoctoral laboratory’s analytical tools at CETYS, a university in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.
“I realized I couldn’t even present my own research in Spanish, and I started asking myself why,” he said.
His philosophy is spare and unambiguous. Asked for the aphorism that best encapsulates his life, he offered three words: science is political. For Dr. Cazares, that is not a provocation. It is a description of what science has always been, and what it can, with effort, become otherwise.
Dr. Christian Cazares’s Genomic Press interview is part of a larger series called Innovators and Ideas that highlights the people behind today’s most influential scientific breakthroughs. Each interview in the series offers a blend of cutting-edge research and personal reflections, providing readers with a comprehensive view of the scientists shaping the future. By combining a focus on professional achievements with personal insights, this interview style invites a richer narrative that both engages and educates readers. This format provides an ideal starting point for profiles that explore the scientist’s impact on the field, while also touching on broader human themes. More information on the research leaders and rising stars featured in our Innovators and Ideas – Genomic Press Interview series can be found on our interview website: https://interviews.genomicpress.com/.
The Genomic Press Interview in Brain Medicine titled “Christian Cazares: Confronting science’s class problem,” is freely available via Open Access, starting on 17 March 2026 in Brain Medicine at the following hyperlink: https://doi.org/10.61373/bm026k.0021.
About Brain Medicine: Brain Medicine (ISSN: 2997-2639, online and 2997-2647, print) is a peer-reviewed medical research journal published by Genomic Press, New York. Brain Medicine is a new home for the cross-disciplinary pathway from innovation in fundamental neuroscience to translational initiatives in brain medicine. The journal’s scope includes the underlying science, causes, outcomes, treatments, and societal impact of brain disorders, across all clinical disciplines and their interface.
