Guiding Light

Social Media & Depression

As per WHO report, it is estimated that nearly 300 million people suffer from depression which is now considered as a leading cause of disability worldwide. Nowadays most of the people use social media platforms, such as twitter and facebook, to share their thoughts and opinions with their contacts. As such, social media provides a means for capturing behavioral attributes that are relevant to an individual’s thinking, mood, communication, activities, and socialization, the emotion and language used in social media postings may indicate feelings of worthless-ness, guilt, helplessness, and self-hatred that characterize major depression. This happens with most of us who regularly use social media on a daily basis. Nobody would deny about this fact that they have had the experience of feeling envious of the fun their friends seem to be having. This might especially be the case if you are sitting at home, feeling bored while everyone else is partying or having a comfortable holiday in the sun. According to majority of us, its obvious and natural to feel like that. So how is is it possible that these feelings could be the start of something worse like depression? Does it makes any sense that using social media actually makes you depressed? Well! a recent study sponsored by the NIMH (national institute for mental health. usa), identified a strong and significant association between social media use and depression. The study found that levels of depression in youth increased with the total amount of time they spent using social media and the number of visits to social media sites per week. There are likely to be many complex reasons why social media use might be associated with depression. For instance, it is possible that people who are already depressed might be more inclined to rely on social media instead of face-to-face interactions, so greater social media use may be a symptom rather than a cause of depression. We all know that ‘Likes’ are the currency of social media, and people who have low self-esteem may place great value on seeking validation from their social media use by trying to attract likes to their comments as a way of increasing their self-esteem. In this way, social media can be a bit of a popularity contest. Of course, “winning” the popularity contest by garnering the most likes is only a short-term boost to morale

….. to be continued