Should digital well-being support be treated like a routine public-health service?

I teach tenth grade, and I can spot the kids drowning in their feeds by second period. The CDC's 2023 youth survey found 40 percent of high school students felt persistently sad or hopeless. CDC Those kids are not booking therapists. But they do show up for school health screenings, the same ones that already check vision, hearing, and scoliosis. Adding two questions about sleep, harassment, and compulsive use to a screening they already attend is the lowest-cost intervention in public health. We do not wait for teenagers to self-diagnose bad eyesight. We should not wait for them to self-diagnose a feed that is wrecking their sleep either.