HOW GOOD IS SOCIAL MEDIA FOR OUR MENTAL HEALTH?

Rodriguez, A., & Rodriguez, C.
2024

Our lives are more and more dependent on social media where we spend a huge amount of time, establishing a considerable part of our social relationships. These applications (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) are useful to connect with friends and coworkers, as well as to retrieve information, follow posts on topics of interest and also expanding businesses. Many people can easily lose track of time scrolling down on the newsfeed with the vast amount of posts and videos that awake our curiosity. Individuals’ engagement on social media, in terms of time and number of activities performed, is often driven by the need for maintaining or upgrading their psychosocial functions. Before exploring these explanations, let’s take a look at the impact of Facebook and other social media networks on mental health.

From studies representing more than 50 000 adolescents (Liu et al., 2022), depressive symptoms were directly related to a higher use of social media, affecting the female gender to a greater extent than their male counterparts. The youth that dedicated more time to social media had 60% increased chances of suffering depressive symptomatology when compared to a reference population. The relationship between time spent on social media and symptoms of depression was also determined. As such, the odds of experiencing depressive symptoms reached 13% for every hour incremented in social media interactions with gender differences (13% for girls and 9% for boys).

The use of social media intensifies depressive symptoms not only in younger people, but also in older populations. In adults who screened negatively for depressive symptoms at baseline, the influence of social media was marked by higher odds of aggravated symptoms (≥ 5 points) in the post-assessment (Perlis et al., 2021). This relationship was not mediated by the source of news, amount of followers and quantity of regular conversations for Facebook and TikTok users. The agegroup affected the most by depressive symptoms included individuals aged 35 years or older in TikTok and Snapchat social media apps, while for Facebook this effect was more evident in people younger than 35 years old (Perlis et al., 2021).

Nowadays, the average time that a person spends, in a day, connected in social media is 144 minutes. The vast majority of young adults use these networks (84% within 18-29 years old), while almost 50% of the oldest (aged above 64 years old) are also social media users. It is worth mentioning that the mean number of social media accounts, per person, has doubled from 4.3 to 8.5 within just 5 years (Woodward, 2024).

Although the pitfalls of social media are relevant, people usually show attitudes consistent with the imperative of having social media in their daily lives. For example, Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) is a concept referring to the perceived state of being afraid of missing something that could originate the feeling of not belonging to a social group, motivating individuals to join social media groups and catch up with their friends’ activities. It seems that this behaviour underlies the avoidance of missing a social event that somehow would influence their role and reputation in a certain group.

Social media use may go from trivial occurrences, such as following how people spend their holidays, where they go for dinner or the birth of a friend’s son to more general topics. For instance, a broader spectrum of social media could be applied to cryptocurrencies when users engage or monitor market values, in order to purchase a coin when is rising in price, as they don’t want to lose the opportunity of getting richer.

References٭

Liu, M., Kamper-DeMarco, K. E., Zhang, J., Xiao, J., Dong, D., & Xue, P. (2022). Time spent on social media and risk of depression in adolescents: A dose-response meta-analysis. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19, 5164. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19095164

Perlis, R. H., Green, J., Simonson, M., Ognyanova, K., Santillana, M., Lin, J., Quintana, A., Chwe, H., Druckman, J., Lazer, D., Baum, M. A., & Volpe, J. D. (2021). Association between social media use and self-reported symptoms of depression in US adults. JAMA Network Open, 4(11), e2136113. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.36113

Woodward, M. (2024, February 21). Social media addiction statistics for 2024. https://www.searchlogistics.com/learn/statistics/social-media-addiction-statistics/

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