Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast produced by the American Psychological Association.

I'm your host, Caitlin Luna. I'm joined by Dr. Thomas Insel, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist

who's co-founder and president of Mind Strong Health, a company that is using mobile technology

to diagnose and treat behavioral health disorders.

Prior to Mindstrong, Dr. Insel was a longtime director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Welcome, Dr. Insel.

Thank you, Caitlin. Pleasure to be here.

Thank you for joining us today.

So at the 2018 APA Convention, you gave a talk with a provocative title called Smartphones or

a Problem, Can They Be a Solution?

And every day we hear about how smartphones are impacting our attention spans, relationships,

a number of things, our health overall.

But they're really our lifelines.

We use them to get wherever we need to go, whatever we need.

So how can they be a solution if they are a problem?

Well, Caitlin, the way that you frame that, I think, is exactly the way we think about it.

They have become a lifeline.

They become a way that we navigate the world.

It's probably not too strong to say that we live on our phones or we live through our phones.

Not making a value judgment here, but that is for better or worse the state of play for

most people, especially younger people in the U.S. and increasingly around the world.

In behavioral health broadly, we've spent much of the last five decades trying to understand

...