Mental health and AI: in Tres Arroyos, a neurologist opens the debate tech companies still haven't settled

By Zendoric · July 31, 2026.

The facts are modest and local: this Friday at 7 p.m., neurologist Eduardo Sage leads an open talk —not a lecture, as he himself defines it— at Editorial Caravana, in Tres Arroyos (province of Buenos Aires, Argentina), on the impact of social media, heavy cell phone use and artificial intelligence (AI) on mental health. As he explained to Diario3, the aim is for the attendees themselves to debate, not to sit through a closed conference.

Sage argues that heavy social media consumption «is shaping a more individualistic personality profile», with isolation from the family environment, excessive screen use and exposure to fake news, which in his view creates difficulties in learning and in relationships. On AI, his position is nuanced: he describes it as a tool that «can be very useful for many professions», but warns that it «can become a problem if it ends up feeding on or spreading false information». His conclusion, as the article sums it up, is that «every new technology needs to be understood» before being consumed «indiscriminately». He also notes, a nuance frequently lost in this debate, that disinformation is not only a teenage problem: adults are also victims of campaigns driven through social media.

It is worth being honest about what this piece is and what it is not. There is no study here, no prevalence figure, no new data: it is the testimony of a local professional, in a community talk format, picked up by a local outlet. That does not make the topic any less legitimate —the relationship between social media, mobile phone use and emotional well-being has been debated for years in the international scientific literature, with no settled consensus on causality— but it does mean Sage's claims should not be treated as verified findings, but as what they are: a neurologist's clinical reading, offered to open a conversation.

That said, the fact that this debate is reaching Tres Arroyos, a town in the interior of Buenos Aires province, is in itself a piece of context worth noting. The discussion about how generative AI is saturating our feeds with synthetic content and fake news is no longer the exclusive preserve of San Francisco labs or regulatory committees in Brussels: it has come down to the neighborhood conversation. That confirms something we at Zendoric have been arguing: the underlying problem is not the technology itself, but the gap in critical literacy with which society absorbs it, and that gap closes —or widens— in spaces exactly like this one, not only in Big Tech's engine rooms.

Our reading is that talks of this kind, however modest, are the flip side of the long-term optimism with which we analyze AI. We maintain that technology can take us to a society of abundance and better health, but that path is not automatic: it demands, as Sage rightly says, understanding before indiscriminate consumption, and that understanding is built with media literacy, not with the hope that the algorithm will regulate itself. The cost of failing to do so —isolation, disinformation, digital anxiety— is precisely the kind of short-term friction that should not be downplayed while the technology matures. That this collective learning is being discussed in an open talk in Tres Arroyos, and not only in an academic paper, is a healthy sign: the conversation about how to live with AI is finally becoming everyone's conversation.