Categories
Uncategorized

Phase Three – Final Assignment

Cover Letter

How social media affects mental health and makes us addicts?

I recently started to realize how greatly social media impacted my life. After a failure on my project for one of my classes because I didn’t prepare enough I realized how addicted I was to social media. Because I spent all my weekend on useless scrolling I failed a project. Of course I was dissatisfied by it, but it was completely my mistake, so from that moment I am trying to be more mindful of how I use social media. In this essay I researched the effects of social media on people’s mental health and how it is so addictive to use them. I tried to reveal the truth about why the rates of social anxiety, depression and even suicides are so high now. It is happening to my generation the most so if we don’t become more mindful in the use of social media, we are in danger. Everything because people love to compare themselves to others they get more insecure in their own accomplishments and develop mental disorders. For example a person goes to the gym only for 6 months, making good progress compared to himself 6 months earlier, but when he sees the person who has been going for years, he gets insecure why his physique is worse. All it comes from the comparison.

Research Essay

Samgar Nurlan ENGL11000

In our fast growing modern world where every field is covered with different types of technologies, people created a free way to communicate with the other part of the world without seeing them in real life. It is what we call social media. Since the creation of the first social media platform in 1996, called “Six Degrees”, the popularity of social media has only risen. Then the giants in social media platforms launched, like Skype, Facebook and Instagram which are still popular till this day, years later. So as the population becomes technologically advanced, the general public health improves. However people usually forget about the other vital part of people’s health, which is mental health. Poor mental health of the population of the country slows down the rate at which the country grows the same way as the poor physical health does. Of course there are institutions that help people with mental disorders, with people like psychologists who do their best to treat those issues. However there are many hidden factors that cause problems with mental health of the population, and we, as a society, don’t talk about it. Government and society nowadays promotes a happy, peaceful life, focusing on things that go well already, completely neglecting the hidden issues of the population. 

So, as social media became a huge part of our lives, it changed how people live their lives. Now at first it may seem as a huge advantage for a society as a whole, however there is an actual darkside behind all of these social media platforms. Social media is the biggest factor affecting the mental health of people in the society, especially adolescents who tend to be more easily influenced by those platforms. There are many studies and researches showing that social media is associated with anxiety, depression and low self esteem, the problems which are disruptive to the health of adolescents. This essay emphasizes the need for less usage of social media for people and society focusing the shift from online connections to real life networking in order for population to grow into a more advanced and healthier version of themselves  

As it was stated earlier, mental health disorders, like anxiety and depression occur when people use social media excessively. It happens because people are constantly seeing other people’s lives and comparing their experiences with their own. This in turn creates a strong dissatisfaction in the mind of people. The most popular example is Instagram, where people post photos or videos of themselves for other people to watch. However, most of these posts are manipulated and show only the good side of their lives. Everyone tends to share just the highlights of their lives, and rarely the low points, the routine, that everyone experiences. (HelpGuide.org 2023) All these posts create an illusion that everybody else lives a better life than you do. It makes people who see the posts insecure about their life experiences and even envy that they couldn’t experience it too, even if they understand that all these photos are lies. 

The other popular thing that is correlated with the use of social media is an abbreviation FOMO, which stands for fear of missing out. What it means is that social media creates the feeling that you are missing out on certain things in your life, while others, as it may seem, live a better life and have more fun than you do (HelpGuide.org 2023). All this can potentially create a strong sense of anxiety, insecurity and low self-esteem. Moreover if not treated, this insecurity can develop into an addiction, when people constantly scroll the feed in order to see any updates or the replies for the messages that can be sent through the app itself. The FOMO disorder forces you to pick up your phone every few minutes and check everything you can and reply to every message you can. All this might potentially cause danger, because people do it even while driving or walking in the crossroad. 

The issues are clearly shown in the academic journal called “Social Media and Mental Health: Benefits, Risks, and Opportunities for Research and Practice” (20 April 2020), John A. Naslund, an Instructor in Global Health and Social Medicine At Harvard Medical School, Ameya Bondre, Master of Science in Public Health (MSPH) andGlobal Health Field Placement Fellow of Johns Hopkins University, USA, John Torus, the director of the digital psychiatry division in the Department of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Kelly Aschbrenner, senior research scientist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health System, assert that in general people using social media have poor mental health by addressing exploratory studies, data from all over the world , and statistics from different surveys. By supplying the reader with information about how the amount of usage of social media affects mental health, John A. Naslund, Ameya Bondre, John Torous & Kelly A. Aschbrenner built their claims about poor mental health among people . They wish to convey to readers the influence of social media on society in order to consider the role of social media as a potentially viable intervention platform for offering support to persons with mental disorders, promoting engagement and retention in care, and enhancing existing mental health services, while balancing the need for safety. The author’s audience likely consists of those interested in statistics about mental disorders as is evident through his/her references to depression and psychotic disorders; they address readers with a tone that is formal and analytical. 

The other study with similar results, but focused only in usage of Facebook is an academic journal published by “American Economic Society ”. Luca Braghieri, Assistant Professor in the department of Decision Sciences at Bocconi University, Ro’ee Levy, assistant professor at the Tel Aviv University School of Economics, and Alexey Makarin, Mitsubishi Career Development Assistant Professor in International Management and an Assistant Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, in their academic journal called “Social Media and Mental Health” imply that since rising popularity of Facebook, the adolescents suffer from poor mental health. They suppots their implications by providing and summarizing several statistical evidences showing that for people aged 15-24, suicides became more prevalent and are now the second leading cause of death. They wish to warn people of the potential danger in using social media, specifically Facebook, for the users mental health Authors’ purpose is to examine the effects of Facebook as a social media on adolescents in order for society to be more aware of such a huge, but hidden problem in the US. They adopt a highly analytical tone for their audience, the readers who are interested in the topic of improving their own mental health.  People who use any type of social media in general suffer from poor mental health, especially adolescents. The statistics from sources show that the amount of people experiencing depression and anxiety only rises and that most people with major mental disorders use social media at least once a week. As the authors of “Social Media and Mental Health: Benefits, Risks, and Opportunities for Research and Practice” say: “Initial studies from 2015 found that nearly half of a sample of psychiatric patients were social media users, with greater use among younger individuals (Trefflich et al. 2015), while 47% of inpatients and outpatients with schizophrenia reported using social media, of which 79% reported at least once-a-week usage of social media websites”. These statistics from the surveys indicate that people with poor mental health use any type of social media more, than a healthy, in general, person. Moreover these people suffer from major mental health problems such as schizophrenia, and not just depression.

After all this summarizing that social media can profoundly weaken your mental health, there is still one question left – why people still use social media on such a huge scale. According to Kepios, a digital advisory firm, “there were 4.95 billion social media users in October 2023. This represents 61.4% of the world’s population.” (Kepios 2023) It means that social media addiction is potentially the most common addiction throughout the world, and is considered a worldwide phenomenon. That is why uncovering the truths about social media use is a vital task in our society. As Jacqueline Sperling, PhD, a psychologist at McLean Hospital who works with youth who experience anxiety disorders, says: “When the outcome is unpredictable, the behavior is more likely to repeat. Think of a slot machine: if game players knew they never were going to get money by playing the game, then they never would play” (McLean 2023). Everything in nature tries to hold on to as much energy as possible, and humans are not exceptions. Energy is the source of life and our instincts understand it, even though it can be harmful for us. The scrolling of social media is a great example. It takes almost nothing to scroll up when you are lying on the couch, which means you don’t spend your energy at all doing it. Moreover, you see absolutely different, by the content, posts which constantly fill your brain with free dopamine, the hormone in your brain that gives you the sense of pleasure. A series of experiments by Princeton psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov reveal that “all it takes is a tenth of a second to form an impression”(How Many Seconds to a First Impression? 2006). It means that when you scroll to a new post, it takes less than a second to know if you like it and keep watching or scroll again if you didn’t like it. All these, coupled with the algorithms of social media, that can read interests and give the posts that one may be interested in makes a person a full addict, who doesn’t even realize that he got addicted. 

Speaking of dopamine, this is considered as one of the main reasons why people get addicted to social media. You see, the dopamine hormone should work as a relieving factor when people do hard work. So great use of it is when a person sets a goal and accomplishes it, the brain releases dopamine to cheer up the body. However when using social media, it works the wrong way. Because the use of social media is a cheap way to get dopamine (it takes nothing for one to scroll the app, which means the hard work wasn’t done), people get it in such high doses that they develop a dopamine resistance. It works the same way as any other type of addiction like smoking. People often don’t realize but a heavy smoker usually needs more cigarettes per day than a beginner. It means that now, in order to feel better, a person has to get more dopamine, to feel as he felt before, thus scrolling more and more falling in the dopamine loop.(Are You Addicted to Social Media? 2020) This way people do not realize they scroll for hours and hours trying to satisfy themselves and never achieving it. This leads to a bad mood, low focus, poor sleep and general unproductiveness. 

In conclusion, the impact of social media on mental health is complex and definitely cannot be ignored. While these platforms have dramatically changed the way we connect, share information, and network, the evidence from different various sources suggests a darkside for them. The issues like anxiety, depression and low self esteem are only a part of what the use of social media causes to the mental health of the users. Moreover the addiction caused by the use of social media leads to other health problems which cannot be neglected. For me, now that I researched the topic deeper and now understand all the effects of social media on me, I will consider deleting some of the apps I don’t actually need, or use them only for urgent cases.

Works Cited

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *