Avoiding Depression: Beware Social Media

Further to what has been referenced previously about needing human contact, beware of relying on social media for that association with other people. 

Many, lacking or fearing direct personal contact, or being reticent to share feelings directly with another person, seek contact on social media platforms. This however is not the same as human-to-human connection.  

In the September 2016 Huffington Post, McGill Professor Robert Whitley writes, “For example, a large-scale University of Pittsburgh study of young adults indicated that heavy social media users are almost three times more likely to be depressed than occasional users.” 

He goes on to state  that according to one research, youth who spend more than two hours per day on social media are more likely to rate their mental health as fair or poor  (Robert Whitley, “Here’s Why Social Media Harms your Teen’s Mental Health,” Huffington Post, September 14, 2016).  

The negative impact of social media on mental health, and its contribution toward the plague of depression is becoming ever more documented in research. While some applications of social media are indeed convenient and helpful, designers deliberately attempt to build an addictive quality into these platforms. 

Author and publisher Gerald Weston, writing for the Tomorrow’s World magazine in 2018, sounds a warning in an article entitled: “Tame the Social Media Monster.”  He writes: 

Significant Silicon Valley players are sounding alarm bells. Sean Parker is not as much a household name as Mark Zuckerberg, but his influence is felt by every Facebook user. Parker is a giant when it comes to social media and, according to his entry on Biography.com, “a darling of the tech world.…”  

Parker recently came out regarding the dangers and the damage to culture and to individuals because of such platforms as Facebook and Twitter. He spilled the beans to Axios, an Internet news source, in late 2017, explaining how Facebook was deliberately designed to addict people to its use. 

“The thought process that went into building these processes, Facebook being the first of them…was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible,’” he said. “And that means we have to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever…. It’s a social-validation feedback loop… exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators—it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Keven Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously,” he added. “And we did it anyway.” 

 

Parker also confessed earlier in the interview: “I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying [in promoting social media], because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and… it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other…. It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains” (Mike Allen, “Sean Parker unloads on Facebook: ‘God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,’” Axios.com, November 9, 2017).     

Gerald Weston goes on to quote a New York Times article that further describes how many leading executives and programmers in Silicon Valley are in fact placing their own children in schools where there is no application of computing technology: 

One would expect that the children of these elite employees, who pay over $17,000 per year in tuition for each elementary student, should have a significant advantage over the rest of us. Whether that is true or not remains to be seen, but here is what is so striking: the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one in a chain of 160 across the United States, shies away from technology—so much so that there are no computers, no iPads, and no iPhones! As the article explained,      

[T]he school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home. Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.  

 New York University professor Adam Alter explains, “75% of the students [at the Waldorf School of the Peninsula] are the children of Silicon Valley tech execs, which is striking. These are people who, publicly, will expound on the wonders of the products they’re producing and at the same time they decided in all their wisdom that their kids didn’t belong in a school that used that same tech” (“Tame the Social Media Monster!,” Tomorrow’s World, March-April, 2018). 

What is it these tech executives fear? Simply this, that the negative impacts of overuse of screen time and the isolating effect of social media create a mind that is less able to concentrate, less able to learn and remember critical knowledge and less able to successfully interact with people. The latter is an essential skill and attribute for one who is truly going to be both happy and successful, less disposed to be debilitated by the wave of depression sweeping over society.  

Minimize your time on social media platforms. It not only isolates the user from real human contact, but contributes to the eventual development of a sense of social isolation, a serious factor contributing to depression. 

Reading books and spending time being helpful to others, even if it means some volunteering, are far better for your mental health and physical health.