Social Media and Depression: Helping or Hurting Us?

Depression

The American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) website defines depression as “a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act.” A few noteworthy symptoms are sad or depressed mood, loss of interest, difficulty concentrating, loss of energy or fatigue, suicidal ideation, and feeling worthless.

If I had to guess, I’d say that you know or are someone who is depressed or has been depressed. But this isn’t an unfounded guess; the APA lists that one in fifteen people struggle with depression any given year and that one in six people will develop depression in their lifetime. I’d also guess that you are active on or at least have a social media account since Facebook has over 2.27 billion monthly active users and Twitter 326 million as of the third quarter of 2018 according to Statista.

So, given how pervasive social media is and the fact that pretty much everyone has the one friend that knows all about what’s good for you, you’ve no doubt heard the colloquial wisdom that social media “causes” depression or at the very least exacerbates it.

This is the wisdom that I had assumed to be true for many years because its logic seemed sound: of course a collection of platforms that rely on displaying the glamor of your friends’ lives and a slot machine-like novelty stream, as Dr. Cal Newport puts it in his TEDx Talk, would prove detrimental to a condition marked by feelings of worthlessness and loss of concentration. After all, you’re still in bed an hour after waking up, not taking that beautiful mountainside bike trail at 7 A.M.

The Research

As is often true of colloquial wisdom, it would seem there is more going on than what is initially apparent. A study by Simoncic et al. from 2014 took a look at the link between social networking site use and its relationship to depression by individuals’ sex and personality.

The researchers recruited 237 participants between the age of 18 and 23 to complete a survey which gauged their depression levels, Facebook usage, and the personality dimensions of extraversion and neuroticism.

In the psychology world, extraversion is characterized as sociability, sensation seeking, and tendency toward obtaining gratification from the world outside oneself. The other measured dimension, neuroticism is essentially proneness to emotional reactivity, difficulty managing emotional states, and general emotional negativity.

What the study discovered is that no association existed between Facebook use and depression symptoms alone, nor when factoring in extraversion and neuroticism. What’s more is that Facebook use appeared to reduce depression symptoms in female participants that scored high in neuroticism; which is interesting given that highly neurotic individuals are considered to be more prone to depression. The researchers attribute this mediating effect to the more highly neurotic female participants possibly using social media as a regulated social environment in which they can more aptly manage social interactions.

When I read this study, it confounded me. Social media has been demonized to me by everyone concerned with wellness, but this scientific source just suggested that it has no effect or even a positive effect on depression. How could everyone have it so backward?

Similarly, a study by Jelenchick et al. done two years earlier gave 190 college students a survey which measured their depression levels. Participants then received surveys over text intermittently for the next week that had them report their online activity, social media or otherwise. Like the study by Simoncic et al., the researchers found no association between social media usage and depression.

So, was I Wrong?

Remember that archetype of the friend that touts off wellness clichés I remarked on earlier? What I didn’t divulge was that for a long time I was that friend. I could go on about cold showers, meditation, ketosis, and the like (these aren’t bad necessarily, but that’s for a later post). Here I felt like someone had pulled the wool over my eyes.

I felt that avoiding most social media had benefited me, and so many people took my word for it when I talked about this subject. Even searching ‘social media fast’ on Google turns up tons of anecdotal reports of people taking month-long or more extensive hiatuses from social media and emerging essentially reborn on the other side with reports of lowered stress, a better social life, telekinesis, etc.

To make sure the anecdotes of hundreds of internet posters and my own experience with abstaining weren’t products of willful delusion, I sought out studies that coincided with what I believed.

First was a study by Sampasa-Kanyinga and Lewis from 2015 which surveyed 753 Canadian middle and high school students on their daily social networking use, psychological distress, suicidal ideation, mental health, and whether they had had an unmet mental health need in the past 12 months.

The study showed that belonging to the cluster of students which had two or more hours of social media use daily was independently associated with suicidal ideation, unmet mental health needs, poor self-rated mental health, and psychological distress.

Another study by Aalbers et al. published in 2018 had 132 undergraduate psychology students complete questionnaires which gauged depression symptoms, stress, and passive and active social media use sent to their phones seven times daily for two weeks.

This study constructed a network of associations between all of the measured factors. From what they found, there is a complex web of interplay between the type of social media use, the amount of social media use, and depression symptoms. The full network of interactions is too lengthy to describe here, and I highly recommend you read the study if you’re interested in the topic, but the highlights were essentially that passive social media use – scrolling, liking, lurking – did not predict later occurring depression symptoms of any sort, but co-occurred with loss of interest, concentration problems, fatigue, and loneliness; rather, passive use predicted later active social media use – posting, commenting, etc. At first, this manifests as a problem of direction; was passive use causing people to experience depression symptoms or the other way around?

The study also tells us that fatigue, loneliness, and active use predict passive use, so I would wager that it’s cyclical – both feed into the tendency to experience the other. Further, participants which had more passive use time did experience higher mean levels of depressed mood, loneliness, hopelessness, and inferiority, but when all variables were considered, a person’s passive use was only directly statistically associated with their active use.

Correlation ≠ Causation

It was good to have a bit of validation for my experience, but if you’ve noticed that this is a lot of surveys: me too. All of what I’d read so far was correlational; there was nothing manipulated by the researchers, and ultimately we did not see what happened when avid social media users reversed their habit or vice versa.

To this end I stumbled upon a study by Morten Tromholt published in 2016. The one-week experiment tasked 1,095 participants average age 34 either to continue their typical Facebook use habits or to abstain. Before and after, they were given surveys which recorded their pre-existing Facebook use patterns, life satisfaction, and the positivity of their emotions.

Following the experiment week, the Facebook abstinence group reported statistically significantly higher life satisfaction and emotional positivity. This coupled with the finding that people with higher baseline Facebook use benefited more from abstaining painted a clear picture that social media use, or at least Facebook use, was detrimental to peoples’ emotional wellbeing. But why?

Well, one possible reason looked at in this study was the dynamic of social comparison to those you follow. The study found that people that reported higher levels of “Facebook Envy” saw greater wellbeing improvements from abstinence. Perhaps this improvement is a product of distancing oneself from others’ lives to appreciate one’s own, or maybe it’s the absence of the well of opportunities for comparison that social media provides us.

Which is it?

In sum, these studies made it clear that I wasn’t crazy for thinking that social media and depression were in cahoots; or at least not any more crazy than these scientists.

But what was going on here? It seemed I could find an equal number of studies which supported or rejected the notion that social media was the enemy of depressed people. Lost, I decided to look up a literature review for the topic and make sure I wasn’t missing something.

The review I found by Baker and Algorta from 2016 had considered much of the literature that I had read and many more studies. Much like myself, they had found that a complex relationship existed between social media and depression, and that the quality and nature of one’s use are likely more important than the frequency or duration of use.

This makes sense; if you go online, receive mostly negative comments on your posts, read antagonistic political discussions, and see the people you follow achieving greater things than you’re doing, and doing it younger, then you’ll no doubt suffer from your social media use.

And while we’re talking about what you see and do on social media, an important distinction brought up in the review is that your interpretation of your social media experience is likely a potent factor in how social media will affect you. Self-talk is a major determinant of your emotional state in reaction to anything you experience, and social media is no exception.

How you use it

At about the halfway point of researching this topic, when I felt I would come to no sound conclusion and my nearly 15 hours of research would be all for naught, I sent a Snapchat to some friends with the angry exclamation “It’s a rabbit hole. Nobody knows what the f*$@ is going on with social media and depression.” And though I didn’t give much thought to what I was doing, I felt a little better. It helped some to unload the frustration, to not be alone with it.

Then, to take a break from poring through research articles, I decided to watch a TEDx Talk by Bailey Parnell about the topic. In the talk she recounts her experience leaving her phone on airplane mode when going on a vacation. She explains the constant checking, phantom vibrations, and anxiety that disconnecting brought her.

She then breaks down what she considers to be the four primary stressors that occur from social media use:

1. Seeing others’ highlight reels
2. Receiving sufficient amounts of the social currency of likes, comments, and shares
3. FOMO or the fear of missing out
4. Online harassment

One particularly interesting statistic she lists from a few Canadian colleges’ research in regard to FOMO is that seven out of ten students would oust social media from their lives were it not for fear of being left out of the loop.

Despite all of these stressors and her own negative experiences with social media she doesn’t condemn social media use altogether. Rather, she suggests that people practice “safe social”. By recognizing a problem with one’s use when it arises, auditing the quality and nature of your use, following only people and pages you find value in, and modeling good online behavior, you can make social media a positive presence in your life.

I think that’s how I had subconsciously learned to use Snapchat. I can make it a negative or positive force in my life, whether I use it to relieve the discomfort of boredom or to relate to and keep up with those I care about.

No Easy Answer…

So, it would seem that, as of yet, no one has a definite guideline for how you should use social media if depression is a concern of yours.

For me, I’ve seen the best results by using it only to plan and manage events or to check up on my close friends if I haven’t talked to them recently. I think the best thing you can do is to occasionally pause to think about what you’re looking at and why you’re looking at it.

Is it adding value to your life or is it only killing time? If you decide to decrease or discontinue your use, I think it’s very important to have a plan for something to replace it with.

For me, social media was a novelty stream like Dr. Newport described. I had a lot of discomfort once I deleted Reddit, Instagram, and Twitter, but replacing that time spent with book reading and the horrifying “time to just think” I’ve gained a lot of clarity as well as motivation. The discomfort of boredom moved me to read, research, and actually start this blog.

So, no matter what you decide about social media, give it some time and experiment. It takes a while for habits to change and for you to feel their effects, but stick with it. Regardless, I hope your choice serves you well and maybe the battle against depression gets a little easier.

References

• Aalbers, G., McNally, R. J., Heeren, A., de Wit, S., & Fried, E. I. (2018). Social media and depression symptoms: A network perspective. Journal of Experimental Psychology. doi:http://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/xge0000528
• Baker, D. A., & Algorta, G. P. (2016). The relationship between online social networking and depression: A systematic review of quantitative studies. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 19(11), 638-648. doi:10.1089/cyber.2016.0206
• Jelenchick, L. A., Eickhoff, J. C., & Moreno, M. A. (2013). “Facebook Depression?” Social networking site use and depression in older adolescents. Journal of Adolescent Health, 52(1), 128-130. doi:10.1016/j.jadohealth.2012.05.008
• Sampasa-Kanyinga, H., & Lewis, R. F. (2015). Frequent use of social networking sites is associated with poor psychological functioning among children and adolescents. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 18(7), 380-385. doi:10.1089/cyber.2015.0055
• Simoncic, T. E., Kuhlman, K. R., Vargas, I., Houchins, S., & Lopez-Duran, N. L. (2014). Facebook use and depressive symptomatology: Investigating the role of neuroticism and extraversion in youth. Computers in Human Behavior, 40, 1-5. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2014.07.039
• Tromholt, M. (2016). The Facebook Experiment: quitting Facebook leads to higher levels of well-being. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 19(11), 661-666. doi:10.1089/cyber.2016.0259
• https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/depression/what-is-depression
• https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/
• https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly-active-twitter-users/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E7hkPZ-HTk&t=135s
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czg_9C7gw0o&t=659s