Any platform that allows social interaction is considered a social media site, including social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. These programs offer today’s youth a portal for entertainment and communication and have grown exponentially in recent years. For teenagers in the modern-day social media has become the primary form of communication between family and friends, offers a space for self-expression, allows people to get support from others, develop new connection and information gathering. How could something with several positive effects also have the power to affect me psychologically to the extent where my entire mentality could significantly spiral downhill?
A common driving factor behind these developed mental health issues in people, especially, in teenagers is the use of social media. Many people are unaware of the effect that social media has on their lives in modern society and have demanded the need for education around mental health. According to, “Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview 2015,” an article written by Amanda Lenhart, that was also published in the Pew Research Center in 2015, “More than half (56%) of teens — defined in this report as those ages 13 to 17 — go online several times a day, and 12% report once-a-day use. Just 6% of teens report going online weekly, and 2% go online less often.”
The current debate surrounding this topic focuses on how teenagers’ mental health and how social media’s underlying powers have glued many to their phones, tablets and computers which creates then leads many to view overuse as addiction. This new issue is constantly evolving as social media websites grow exponentially which lead me to target teenagers because these platforms affect a lot of people in the age group that I belong to. Therefore, making it not only mine, but our responsibility as consumers to do our research into the effects that these sites have on our everyday life.
An article published in a well-respected Indian Medical Journal begins by discussing that social media is the newest and most commonly used method of communication and information gathering that people use today. Gagan Deep elaborates extensively by discussing the fact that among teenagers (those ages 13-19) especially use social media as their main form of communication in today’s society. Deep continues by defining what an addiction is and takes away the perception of addiction as being to a drug or alcohol. While it is true that one can be, and many are, addicted to drugs or alcohol, this is not the only type of addiction. It further cited social media as a new addictive item in our modern society and speaks about the fact that the intensity of this addiction of today’s teenagers to social media can be harmful to their mental health. The article offers a couple of solutions for teenager to use when dealing with social media, and avoiding, if possible, an addiction.
The first way is through education and awareness. Educating teenager is extremely important to fighting or realizing a social media addiction. This is one of the best tools we have today to fight social media addiction. The second way of fighting social media addiction in teenagers is engagement in extracurricular activities. Some teenagers form these addictions because they are bored and unlike some addictions caused by stress or feelings of inadequacy, social media addiction can be caused purely by boredom, and even cause some of the factors that could lead to a more serious addiction. Therefore, taking away the drive to seek out other forms of entertainment in the form of social media. The final way the article suggests dealing with social media addiction is using limitations and restrictions. The article suggests systems such as required authorization for users under 18, or the app using a time limit feature to avoid abuse. If I were using this article in a paper, I would use their definition of social media as an addiction. I would also use their suggestions to help those who are addicted to beat their addiction or help parents or teenagers who worry they or their children might become addicted, to find strategies to avoid that addiction.
Clive Cookson expands on the topic of social media usage increasing and how the effects lead to mental illness with the use of a study, conducted in England that follows the social media usage of nearly 10,000 teenagers for three years from ages 13 to 16. This study was carried out by Imperial College and University College London and was published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health journal. The article sites the researchers saying “Our results suggest that social media itself doesn’t cause harm, but that frequent use may disrupt activities that have a positive impact on mental health such as sleeping and exercising, while increasing exposure of young people to harmful content — particularly the negative experience of cyberbullying”. The peer-reviewed study examines the effects that social media has on the health and lifestyle of those studied.
Rachel Ehmke from the Child Mind Institute also adds to this point in her article, “How Social Media Affects Teenagers,” by shedding light on the fact that, “Teens are masters at keeping themselves occupied in the hours after school until way past bedtime. When they’re not doing their homework (and when they are) they’re online and on their phones, texting, sharing, trolling, scrolling, you name it.” .Ehmke states a few effects such as indirect communication, cyberbullying & the imposter syndrome, stalking/ being ignored whilst offering methods to lower the risks of these outcomes and providing information on how parents can assist in the process of decreasing the abuse of social media during their children’s adolescent years. The article also cites many medical advisors, such as; Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair who states, “There’s no question kids are missing out on very critical social skills. In a way, texting and online communicating—it’s not like it creates a nonverbal learning disability, but it puts everybody in a nonverbal disabled context, where body language, facial expression, and even the smallest kinds of vocal reactions are rendered invisible.”
The study concluded that social media usage was psychologically harmful to users of both sexes, however the effects were twice as harmful in girls. A clinical and developmental psychologist, Dr. Donna Wick who speaks on the effect of cyberbullying where she elaborates on how these platforms provide an environment where it is a big danger that offers a space that allows kids to communicate more indirectly and t it has gotten easier to be cruel. “Kids text all sorts of things that you would never in a million years contemplate saying to anyone’s face,” it was also noted that girls tend to gossip more and speak ill of each other more with the use of social media, rather than in ‘real life.’
The unhealthy effects were caused by three main drivers: cyberbullying, sleep loss, and reduced physical activity. All three of these items have major psychological effects on teenagers. The use of social media in those studies also raised considerably during this time. For the boys their frequent use of social media went from 43% to 69% while the girls it went from 51% to 75%. Additionally, continuing by saying that parents should be more involved in helping their children limit their social media usage to encourage more physical activity and better sleep schedules. Cooks is also careful to note that the existence of social media is not the cause of the mental health issues but rather the users abuse of the sites that are causing bullying, sleep deprivation, and decreased physical activity.
Another study of the mental health effects of social media by the University of California Los Angeles mapped out the brain during an experiment which they had designed. The researchers created a fake app that worked similarly to Instagram and mapped the brains of 32 teenagers and showed them 140 pictures and led them to believe that their friends had given the likes when the researchers had assigned the values. They found that the reward center of the teen’s brains lit up when they viewed images with a large number of likes, it is the same part that lights up when you win money. Peer acceptance has become a major priority within teenagers. Add to that the fact that teens today are getting actual polling data on how much people like them or their appearance via things like “likes” through platforms such as: Twitter, Instagram, etc. It’s enough to turn anyone’s head. Who wouldn’t want to make themselves look ‘cooler’ if they can? So teens can spend hours pruning their online identities, trying to project an idealized image which also supports the idea of creating distorted versions of their life. This part of the brain is more sensitive during adolescence, which makes the writers theorize that it could be a reason that teenagers are so drawn to social media because they have a hard time regulating their own screen time allowing the increase of the negative effects of social media.
Prem Jagyasi also continues by listing some of the effects of social media on the teenage brain: depression, sleep deprivation, anxiety, envy, and communication problems in this article, “Social Media and Teen Mental Health: How deep is the relation?”. It discusses in detail the many ways that these afflictions are exacerbated by social media, starting with depression, there has been no cause and effect relationship but has made some of the symptoms worse in those who overuse social media. Another issue is sleep deprivation which leads to lower grades, unhealthy habits, anxiety and many other things which is caused by a desire to check social media in the middle of the night. One of the most important ones is anxiety caused by the need to keep and up to date, quick responding online presence and be careful not to commit online faux pas. This has led many teens to feel a lot more anxiety around what to post. As a result of social media teens are better able to place their envy on other teens lives, envy at this time is very common for children of this age but it is made worse with social media, and usually teens react to envy with bullying. In addition, one of the final drawbacks of social media is its failure to teach teenagers proper communication skills because they are unable to see body language and facial expression which can hinder development.
In “Social Media and Teens: Health Concerns may be Exaggerated, Study Suggests,” Aneri Pattani challenges the relationship between social media and the negative effects that most people believe that social media is having on teenagers and their mental health. Pattani starts by laying out the narrative “Social media is depriving today’s teens of human connection, forcing them to compete with unrealistic, curated lives, and ultimately making them depressed, lonely, and unhappy.” This narrative is common, and studies have shown this including studies included in this report. Though this article challenges the fact that social media is the “cause” of these issues or rather forms a correlation because adolescents are just more mentally unstable than their adult counterparts.
The study feels as though, the average teenager is almost not affected by their social media usage, neither positive nor negative and takes information by tracking teenagers over a period of time rather than their feeling at a single or few points in their lives. The article questions whether teens chose to use social media because they were depressed or if it was the social media that caused the depression.
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