For Part 1, I chose Reamer’s Social Work Boundary Issues in the Digital Age because the case scenarios gave me real situations to react to. For Part 2, I am putting Haidt and Rausch’s Seven Lines of Evidence and Haidt’s TED talk in conversation with a population I already know from the inside: adults in recovery from stimulant addiction.

Part 1: Through the Reamer Lens

The scenario that got under my skin was the one where a former client sends a Facebook friend request fourteen months after his teenage daughter died and their work together ended (Reamer, 2023). Reamer structures this as an ethical judgment case, not misconduct. The ethical answer is no. Every ethical standard that he cites backs that up. I know the answer. I would still feel a very large pull to accept the request.

I have already lived a version of this. On my last day at my BSW placement at the DeKalb County Public Library, a patron I had been helping weekly with job applications realized I was leaving and asked for my number. He was cognitively slow. After a few sessions of encouragement, he finally went to the Goodwill Career Center and put a resume together with their help, but he still could not check email, send a text, or submit an application on his own. He was terrified of being stranded without me. He kept saying, “let’s stay in touch.” I could not tell him yes and I could not stand to tell him a flat no. What I said was, “my time ends here, and we have your number written down.” Then I gave the remaining library staff his email login so they could keep helping him check it after I was gone. I handed the relationship back to the institution instead of taking it home with me.

That is what I keep thinking Reamer minimizes. He treats the friend request as a binary option. If you accept, you have crossed a line. If you decline, you have done the right thing. Real practice usually has a third door, which is redirecting the client’s need back into a legitimate channel, so the person is not dropped without options. If I could not find that third door with the father in the Facebook scenerio, I still would reject the invite. But I would want to name that for myself that saying no to him is not the whole answer. The whole answer includes what else I can point him toward.

Where I think Reamer (2023) overstates it is that his framing can make the rule sound more absolute than it is. If I ran into a former client at Kroger five years after termination, I would say hi, be brief, and keep walking. That is not unethical. What makes the Facebook request different is not the time since termination but the design of the medium. A hello in the produce aisle ends when one of us walks away. A Facebook friendship does not end. It compounds.

If I had to explain my position to a client right now, I would say this: Ending well is part of the work. Friending you back would be unethical under the standards I practice by. It would also undermine the work we did together and turn it into something it was never built for. Also, I don’t have a Facebook account anymore.

Part 2: Haidt in the Room with Your Clients

Haidt and Rausch (2026) build their case on minors. I want to apply their evidence to a population they don’t touch: adults in active stimulant addiction. Speaking from my own recovery, this is a population they should pay attention to.

During my stimulant addiction in my late twenties and early thirties, I was not sleeping and I was on Facebook constantly. In my experience, many stimulant addicts can’t step away from their technology. That was me. What Haidt (2026) calls the ultrasocial wiring did not shut off when I was using. It got hijacked. I spent hours trying to decode why certain posts appeared in my feed, why one person liked something and another did not, and what it meant when someone showed as “available” and did not respond. My Facebook feed of content never ended. That is addiction stacking on top of the exact same reward architecture Haidt describes, in a brain that is already hypervigilant, already sleepless, and very dopamine-hungry. His evidence does not cover this population, but it’s definitely worth studying how these two addictions can compound each other. Haidt already treats social media as addictive on its own. What he doesn’t address is what happens when that addiction stacks on top of an active stimulant addiction, where each one makes the other worse. The stimulants kept me awake to keep scrolling. The scrolling gave the stimulants something to do. His argument about social media harm holds up for adults, and it holds up for people in active stimulant addiction. Both populations show the same reward-driven compulsive use that his adolescent evidence describes. What his framework doesn’t account for is what happens when those occur in the same person at the same time.

For clinical practice in addiction services, this changes what recovery has to look like. When I got clean, the program I was in took every electronic device away from me for twelve months. No phone. No computer. At the time it felt extreme. Looking back, it was the thing that let my nervous system come back to reality. I would not have made it if I had stayed plugged in. It just wouldn’t have worked. Haidt’s own evidence supports this. The randomized trials he and Rausch (2026) cite show that reducing social media use improves mental health in as little as a week. My twelve months was a longer, harder version of the same intervention. This is the part I would bring into an addiction services setting: a longer period of hard abstinence from the platforms, not just the substances, so the reward system has time to reset.

Where his framework gets more complicated is in programs with adult populations where the phone is not optional. When I start my practicum at Nicholas House this fall, I expect to work with families experiencing homelessness whose phones are used for housing searches and rental applications, benefits portals, job applications, employer communication, gig work apps, telehealth and prescription apps, storage of vital documents, banking apps, transit apps, school and teacher communications, court dates and legal aid, and staying connected to family, support networks, and case managers. For them, the phone is infrastructure. In the event of a client with a social media addiction, the intervention that worked for me, full abstinence for a substantial period of time, is not easy if you have a smart phone. You cannot take the device away without cutting them off from the services keeping them housed. And asking them to just abstain from the social media platforms is a different plan than what worked for me, because the platforms live on the same device as everything else they need.

References

Haidt, J. (2026, April). *How screens stole childhood — and how to get it back* [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_how_screens_stole_childhood_and_how_to_get_it_back

Haidt, J., & Rausch, Z. (2026). Seven lines of evidence against social media. *After Babel*. https://www.afterbabel.com/p/seven-lines-of-evidence-against-social-media

Reamer, F. G. (2023). Social work boundary issues in the digital age: Reflections of an ethics expert. *Advances in Social Work, 23*(2), 375–391. https://doi.org/10.18060/26358