CAN you begin to imagine what would happen if a new designer drug used by our young people was found to cause depression, sleep loss, anxiety, and low self-esteem? Before you could utter the phrases “suicide threat” and “moral panic” we would be shutting night clubs and arts venues and threatening to fire chief constables.

But it’s not a drug — well, not in the chemical form of a tablet or injection — and it’s administered not in clubs but in your sons’ and daughters’ bedrooms, and perhaps even your own. Under your roof. With your consent. Twitter, Facebook and like phenomena of our age have now been shown to carry dangers.

Like chemical drugs these involve addiction and a peculiar enslavement, and now for the first time we have direct evidence of the damage, proven and potential.

The social media have been liberating forces in many ways, giving power and a voice to those who engage in a way unimaginable for the public discourse or traditional newspaper letter writers of the past. But attention is a drug and according to Glasgow University researchers it is an addictive one which leaves teenagers who log into Twitter and Facebook late at night prone to issues around “sleep quality, self-esteem, anxiety, depression and emotional investment in social media.”

Dr Heather Cleland Woods argues that adolescence is already a period of increased vulnerability for the onset of depression and anxiety, and poor sleep quality may contribute to this.

She claims: “It is important that we understand how social media use relates to these. Evidence is increasingly supporting a link between social media use and wellbeing, particularly during adolescence.”

There are no simplistic answers to this. You cannot uninvent the wheel or fire, as has been said of other technologies from television to the nuclear bomb. Invention brings change and it is up to society to adapt.

What the Glasgow University researchers have revealed is that the 467 teenagers surveyed were without doubt affected by their night-time use of social media, and that this affected sleep quality, self-esteem, anxiety, and depression.

Further, there was the issue of “emotional investment in social media which relates to the pressure felt to be available 24/7 and the anxiety around, for example, not responding immediately to texts or posts.”

This is not restricted to our young people. Emotional investment in social media can affect users of all ages and response anxiety is not age restricted. But perhaps we all need to take a step back and put some limits on this with, say, a final social media check at a specific hour.

Simply banning the use of mobile phones, tablets or computers late at night does not seem to be an option for parents, given that these are put to constructive use by conscientious student on a regular basis.

Instead, in the case of this new social non-chemical drug, the same applies as to the older physical drugs or alcohol. Talk. Old-fashioned, first-hand, direct conversation and the genuine offer of sage advice. You never know, it might work.