Why kids and adults can be damaged by social media
We’ve all read the headlines and heard the reports: social media can be bad for youngsters. It’s been linked to all sorts of psychological problems, from depression to eating disorders.
There’s no doubt that, thanks to social media, children are bombarded with unrealistic portrayals of the body. I see the fallout of this in my eating disorder clinic all the time, with youngsters describing how they started to restrict their diet after seeing pictures of models with their clavicles jutting out and showing off unfeasibly taut abdominal muscles.
Social media exposes children to manipulated, artificial and unachievable images of the body, which promotes low self-esteem and low self-worth.
And I’ve seen plenty of youngsters who have experienced abuse and bullying online, driven to self-harm as a way of dealing with the stress, with some even attempting suicide.
Indeed, just this week Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt warned that safeguards around children using social media were ‘inadequate’ and blamed tech firms for ‘turning a blind eye’ to the emotional problems and mental health difficulties triggered in children owing to unfettered access to online platforms.
But now a new study has suggested that it’s not just children who suffer as a result of social media. In fact, the research found that, when used properly and with caution, social media can actually have a positive impact on youngsters, educating them, empowering them and helping them to connect with like-minded peers and expand their horizons.
Yet it seems that for people over 30, social media tends to do the opposite, having a negative impact on users’ mental health, putting them at greater risk of depression and anxiety caused by spending too much time online.
In contrast to the generation who have grown up using technology, middle-aged and older users tended to report higher levels of stress the more time they spent on social media platforms such as Facebook.
Why could this be? It’s interesting we assume that, just because someone is older, they’re not as susceptible to the constant drip- drip effect of polished and sanitised aspects of other people’s lives and comparing them with their own unfavourably. Indeed, just as youngsters respond to being bombarded with photoshopped images of models by assuming that their own body is grossly flawed, so older users read the status updates of their friends and acquaintances, see the pictures from luxury holidays, the big houses, the successful careers and compare them unfavourably to their own humdrum lives.
The problem with social media is that it shows the flashy designer handbag, but not the crippling credit card bill that accompanies it. It shows the paradise beach holiday, but not the flaming row with the spouse and the miserable kids who complained the whole time. It doesn’t show real life, yet we assume it does.
In many ways, I think it’s almost worse for grown-ups than for children, because adults assume they are immune to all this, when the opposite is true. They sit there, late at night, ruminating over the failures in their lives while online they find countless examples of friends and acquaintances whose lives appear so much better than theirs — only reaffirming their belief that they’ve failed in life. No wonder they become depressed and anxious.
But I also worry about what this does to us as a society, shifting us towards expressing what’s happening in our lives only in material terms, success being all about possessions, experiences and status.
The stuff that really matters can’t possibly be captured on social media: there isn’t a status update for ‘my kids are growing up oK’, or ‘I love my family’ — and yet surely these are more important that any material possession.