It’s an established fact that use of social media has long been associated with depression among teenagers, new research reveals that the issue may be more problematic than it appears.
The study involved interviews with nearly 10,000 children between the ages of 13 and 16 in the UK. The scientists discovered that social media may damage girls’ mental health by making them more vulnerable to bullying and decreasing their sleep and physical workout.
One of the authors of the research opined that their conclusions reveal that, although social media does not cause damage per se, regular use may upset activities that have an encouraging effect on mental health. He added that social media also tends to expose young people to injurious content, chiefly the adverse experience of internet-bullying.
In other words, social media itself might not be responsible for psychological health issues, but it takes away from girls’ sleep quality and workout while making users vulnerable to cyberbullying, leading to lower welfare and difficulties with mental health.
A lecturer in clinical psychology at the University of Surrey divulged this suggests methods focusing only on decreasing social media use as an instrument to enhance well-being or psychological health might not help.
The researcher said that building approaches to boost resilience to cyberbullying and that encourage better sleep and workout behaviors may well be what is required to decrease both physical and mental harms.
The study authors said that, for boys, the effect on their psychological health may well be on account of other reasons, so more research is required.
The study was done by quizzing teenagers once a year from 2013 to 2015. They would describe the incidence that they checked or used social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter and Snapchat. More than three times every day was considered “very frequent.”
The investigators noted that they did not capture how much time participants spent on these websites, which is a limitation of the study.
In 2014 and 2015, researchers asked about the teens’ psychological distress and their personal well-being, things like life satisfaction, happiness and anxiety.
The researchers found that, in both sexes, very frequent social media use was associated with greater psychological distress. The effect was especially clear among girls: The more often they checked social media, the greater their psychological distress.
But closely 60pc of the effect on mental anguish in girls could be accounted for by little sleep quality and better exposure to cyberbullying, with reduced physical activity playing a smaller role. But for boys, those features explicated only 12pc of the impacts of very recurrent social media use on mental anguish.
How to help teens
That social media has been associated to mental health issues goes without saying. Just last month, research disclosed that excessive use of social media was associated with enhanced depressive symptoms in adolescents.
This research helps put the problem in a better framework. It’s not essentially social media that’s creating these problems; it’s more likely the content that youth are exposed to and its interruption of healthy sleep and workout.
A professor at Ghent University in Belgium said that it’s an important distinction, adding that if the shift of healthy lifestyles and cyberbullying can be weakened, the positive effects of social media use, such as motivating social interactions, can be more recognized.