Anxiety, depression and other mood disorders in children have become more prevalent due to influence from a rapidly increasing number of technology and social media offerings in the past two decades.
“I feel like we have an anxious generation,” social worker Melissa Warwick told Illinois Times in her Auburn Community School District office. Students try to find solace in Warwick’s office, decorated with welcoming posters and friendly messages threaded into pillow covers. The walls display artwork from students. She has been with the district for 17 years and said there’s been more children visiting her office over recent years.
“I would say our enrollment has been decreasing, but our caseloads have been increasing,” she said. State data indicates the district’s enrollment is currently around 1,100 students and has shrunk by 20%, almost 300 students, over the past seven years.
Data from the largest long-term study of brain development in the U.S. was used in a study published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association and showed that symptoms of depression in children increased as social media use grew. More studies over the years have indicated a rise in other symptoms associated with mood disorders as a result of increased time spent on social media. The World Health Organization estimates more than 1 billion people live with diagnosable mental health disorders, a statistic that the organization says is a call for countries to “scale up services to protect and promote people’s mental health.”
In addition to working with elementary students, Warwick also does one-on-one meetings with some high schoolers and said the anxieties she sees manifest in a variety of ways. She said it’s clear how mental health can be impacted by increased access to the internet’s endless information.
“It was paper and pencil activities 10 years ago – even that’s just different now, everything is really computer-based,” she said. “They didn’t have a Chromebook or a laptop that was with them all the time. Now these kids have access 24-7 to absolutely everything.”
Modern technology can stoke common anxieties for teenagers, Warwick said.
“Thinking about junior high (or) high school kids that are very impressionable – having access to social media – they know where everyone is, they can locate everyone,” she said. “‘My friends are here and I didn’t get an invitation,’ and that causes some major anxiety.”
Those problems multiply for some Auburn students who are in need of counseling or therapy, as the closest providers are in Springfield. Ashley Weber-LeBar, also a social worker at Auburn Community School District 10, said the distance to medical professionals is a real barrier.
“Even just medical needs, anything in Springfield is just really hard to get to for most of our population,” Weber-LeBar said.
Melissa Warwick, a social worker with the Auburn Community School District, said that although enrollment has decreased in recent years, her caseload has increased as more students are coping with mental health issues. PHOTO BY Zach Adams
At a Sangamon County Mental Health Commission meeting in August, the two Auburn social workers informed the commission about children they have worked with who struggled to get transportation to therapists and doctors.
“There are agencies that will go to Auburn and pick up, but they’re not reliable. We’ve got families that call the number and set it up for the date and time, and then the car is a no-show, and then the family has then missed their appointment,” Warwick said last month. “If you miss one or two appointments, you’re bumped from the list, and then they lost their counseling spot.”
Warwick, who is also the district’s homeless liaison, told the commission roughly 40 students in the district were experiencing some kind of homelessness and Springfield’s resources felt out of reach.
“Even though it’s a very small community, it’s difficult sometimes to identify these families and doubled-up situations. They’re embarrassed; they don’t want to talk about it or share their private situations,” she said. “Once I identify them, we try to give them as many resources as possible. Obviously, that’s here in Springfield. We don’t have those types of resources down in the Auburn area – transportation to Springfield is huge – that’s our biggest boundary we have.”
For families with more significant needs, finding a children’s therapist can be difficult as most providers have waitlists that often span weeks or longer.
Melissa Fisher Paoni, a licensed psychologist and co-owner of Springfield Psychological Center, said waitlists for her practice have consistently been quite long.
“It depends on the provider, it’s either several weeks or several months depending on the type of service,” Paoni said. “I think that’s been the case for years.”
She added that today’s digital world is particularly likely to increase anxieties in young girls – though all children are susceptible to mental health effects from overuse of social media.
“Social media, in particular, affects girls more so in terms of negative comparison,” Paoni said. “And this is true for all kids and adolescents. The constant scrolling with looking at other people’s profiles and things like that leads to negative comparisons and negative self-concept issues.”
Melissa Fisher Paoni sits in her Springfield office, filled with games and books geared toward children. PHOTO BY DILPREET RAJU 
Melissa Fisher Paoni shows pages from her 2025 children’s book, “You’re Invited.” PHOTO BY DILPREET RAJU 
Games focused on social learning fill parts of a Springfield Psychological Center office. PHOTO BY DILPREET RAJU
Consuming large amounts of digital media without aim, Paoni says, can have harmful effects.
“Kids who are watching these short, intense videos one after the next have an almost obsessive-compulsive quality to their actions because of this homogeneous content that’s (viewed) over and over and over again,” she said. “That’s a different kind of anxiety where you have this dopamine rush and then you want more of it. It’s different than maybe (what we saw) prior to the prevalence of screens.”
State law introduces mental health screenings
Gov. JB Pritzker has made children’s health a major focus of his office through a number of executive actions and laws since becoming governor six years ago. This July, he signed a bill into law requiring mental health screenings for public school students in grades 3 through 12 – which goes into effect during the 2027-28 school year – though parents can waive their child’s participation.
At the signing, Pritzker was asked how the screenings fit into the state’s capacity to care for the children that screenings could catch.
“Those are steps we’ve been taking for some number of years and will need to continue to take, expanding the availability of providers that you can refer somebody to,” he said. “We have so many challenges we’re trying to overcome at once; it starts with overcoming the stigma that people are experiencing.”
While some people may still think of mental health problems as less than substantial issues, school social workers, often with hundreds of students on their caseload, are on the front lines.
Weber-LeBar – who administered and scored mental health screening paper questionnaires when working at Waverly Community School District 6 – said the law will be good for the state’s students. However, she believes additional resources need to be put toward people who manage and care for those children because of the amount of work it puts onto social work staff.
“I loved it,” she said about the standardized questionnaire, “because it caught so many students that otherwise would have completely flown under the radar. Kids that I never would have thought needed services scored really high and those are kids that totally would have fallen through the cracks… we just also need some support because it’s going to blow up once they start doing this. But overall, I think it’ll be good for the future of the state.”
The Waverly school district implemented mental health screenings in the summer of 2020, shortly after the pandemic prompted remote schooling, which only exacerbated social and emotional problems for many students.
Weber-LeBar said the process resulted in more referrals for students to see a social worker or counselor, even though some parents decided not to sign their child up for the questionnaire.
“It really, really increased my workload, but it was worth it to me because we were able to help kids,” she said, “but I mean, it requires a ton of extra work.”
She said a school district larger than Waverly, which had just about 350 students enrolled while Weber-LeBar was there, would likely need to score questionnaires digitally.
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Springfield District 186, which has almost 13,000 students enrolled, already offers digital mental health screenings and houses clinicians in schools, all of which also have at least one dedicated full-time social worker.
“District 186 ensures students have access to immediate and ongoing support. In addition, the district employs school psychologists who provide specialized services,” school district communications director Rachel Dyas wrote in a statement. Scored screenings are shared with parents. “For students who screen in the high-risk range, our social workers and psychologists examine the data, talk with the students and have conversations with parents regarding needs and next steps.”
Dana Weiner, a child welfare expert and chief of the state’s Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation Initiative, told an Illinois Times reporter last year that BEACON – the online platform the state will use to administer mental health screenings – acts as a routing tool “so that parents and other concerned adults don’t have to do a lot of searching to find the appropriate (service) for kids.”
She emphasized that it will not solve grander systemic problems Illinois mental health care providers are facing, but it can streamline how families or teachers find resources children might need.
“It is not a diagnostic tool. It does not make appointments,” Weiner said, “or address any of our capacity concerns. What it does is it puts all the information in one place. It gives parents the opportunity to almost immediately connect with a person.”
Privacy concerns
BEACON, which stands for Behavioral Health Care and Ongoing Navigation, will act as an online one-stop location to search for mental health resources and connect children to state programs run by an array of different state agencies. It marks another step by the administration to consolidate and streamline government services for families following the creation of the Department of Early Childhood, which is set to be operational within the next year.
The tool being utilized to administer the mental health screening was originally touted as being “powered by Google Cloud’s secure, scalable, and advanced artificial intelligence and cloud computing technology” in a January 2024 press release announcing the platform.
There has been no mention of Google’s artificial intelligence in any government press materials released about BEACON since the platform’s initial announcement.
The mental health screening law requires state officials to outline “model procedures and guidance” by next September and must include “the option to opt-out, confidentiality and privacy considerations, communication with families and communities about the use of mental health screenings, data sharing, and storage of mental health screening results and plans for follow-up and linkage to resources after screenings.”
Fred Cate, an information privacy professor at Indiana University Bloomington’s Maurer School of Law, said even if the data is being stored by the state, Google’s involvement with BEACON means some level of interaction with the data.
“In other words, the state may be retaining legal control of it but, why do you go to Google if it’s not to provide services to the data or for the data? And so, I have to think the data are being stored, or analyzed, by Google,” Cate told an Illinois Times reporter last year. “The press release said they’re using AI to do this. Well, for AI to work, the data and AI have to touch each other, and I have to think that’s the service Google’s providing.”
A one-stop system to find services and manage mental health records could come at the cost of privacy for the hundreds of thousands of children who may eventually utilize the platform. State agencies have experienced dozens of cybersecurity attacks in the past decade.
Last year, Google was required to delete billions of records containing private browsing data collected through ‘incognito’ mode on its Chrome browser, though it was not required to pay plaintiffs who asked for billions of dollars. More recently, a federal jury ordered the company valued at trillions of dollars to pay $425 million in damages for illegally tracking data accessed through private browsing settings, though Google said it would be appealing the decision. Lawyers who filed the case argued the tech giant was collecting data from users through apps that connect to Google accounts in order to sell ads.
In response to questions from Illinois Times about Cate’s comments, the Department of Human Services said Google does not have access to the state’s data.
“The state of Illinois hosts its data in a private Google Cloud environment that is exclusively managed and controlled by the state of Illinois, not Google,” the statement reads. “The AI model powering BEACON’s features, such as resource matching and navigation, is deployed privately within the state’s environment on Google Cloud.
“While the data resides on Google Cloud’s infrastructure, it is fully isolated, and only authorized state of Illinois personnel with proper credentials can access it,” according to the IDHS statement. “Google’s role is strictly limited to providing the underlying infrastructure, with no ability to interact with or extract the state’s data.”
Cate, who has served on various federal panels and subcommittees regarding cybersecurity, said people will likely use BEACON but that doesn’t guarantee trust in the platform.
“People will feel like they don’t have much choice,” he said. “I think it’s more likely you’ll say, ‘I don’t have the time or energy to really care.’”
Cate explained that in times of crisis, people are less concerned with their privacy.
“If you’re the parent of a child that needs mental health services, you’re probably feeling pretty desperate to start with,” Cate said. “You might trade your privacy concerns for the convenience of this service.”
Dilpreet Raju is a staff writer for Illinois Times and a Report for America corps member.
This article appears in September 11-17, 2025.
I work for Central Illinois Service Access, a social services agency advocating for those with special needs and overseeing their services. Any of the kids or adults, who are dually diagnosed, i.e., suffer from both a mental health diagnosis as well as intellectual disability, are struggling even more. Most are on a Medicaid Waiver and there are so few doctors who are willing to accept the insurance. That number is even lower when you are trying to find a psychiatrist who understand disabilities like autism, down syndrome and a myriad of other diagnosis.