UPDATE: For clarity, YES this site IS definable as a social/
digital media site, and the diary’s content applies fully to
it; this is not a diary taking any superior position whatsoever toward the sites that appear in the research.
“Social media poses a public health risk to everybody,” Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in a Yahoo News “Skullduggery” podcast interview, adding that she had quit Facebook to not be part of that. A pretty stern position for a social media savvy 29-year-old politician who’d used FB as her “primary digital organizing tool for a very long time”. But she reached the conclusion that it contributes to "increased isolation, depression, anxiety, addiction, {and} escapism."
The vast majority of research seems focused on pre-teens through young adults (i.e., into their early twenties). Whether adults should conclude, “Whew, safe!” seems contradicted by AOC’s certainties. Maybe we all should extrapolate from accessible research, as she seems to.
Just this September, Jama Psychiatry published findings of research with over 6500 adolescents, that three hours a day or more on social media increases the risk for depression, anxiety, and other “internalizing” problems. Last October, the New York Times published an article detailing the efforts of Silicon Valley titans and workers alike to keep their children away from digital technology. Also last year,
...the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published updated guidelines endorsing universal screening for depression in children aged 12 years or older. Colleen Kraft, MD, past president of the AAP, told Medscape in an interview that she believed social media plays a role in the increased rate of suicide among adolescent girls.
In February, CNN news said research into bullying, “feelings of overwhelming pressure”, and suicides associated with social media were inclining UK government ministers to consider restrictions for the protection of youngsters.
The emergence of social media has paralleled a decline in mental health globally, with the World Health Organization now listing depression as the leading cause of ill health and disability.[WHO: Depression: let's talk] A [2005-2017] high-profile study showed precipitous spikes in mood disorders and suicides over the same period among adolescents and young adults. Although two trends can occur independently, researchers have been asking for years whether they might be related, and recently large-scale epidemiologic studies have begun piecing together the initial clues to how social media might be affecting young persons.
The Center for Research on Media, Technology, and Health at the University of Pittsburgh —site illo perhaps ironic— holds an impartial position on social media effects. They expected their 2018 analysis of depression and anxiety research with 1730 media-using 19-32 year-olds to generate a U-shaped curve, on the logic that abstainers —at the one extreme— would have high rates of mental health issues in lacking opportunities for that interaction, and high-volume users also would, in losing opportunities for real-world relationships,
with the middle groups having the lowest psychological burden.
Instead, what they saw was a straight line: The more the participants engaged in social media, the higher their risk for depression and anxiety [and] "… the lowest risk was with the lowest amount or none."
[They’ve] uncovered similar associations between increased social media use and social isolation, [and] issues related to eating, and sleep problems.
This jibes with research in other countries grouping social media with video games, smartphone use, etc: of the 220,000 adolescent subjects, the ones using digital media more than 5 hrs/day were 48%-171% more likely to report unhappiness, depression, loneliness, even suicidal behavior, than under-an-hour-per-day users.
Granted the range of variables is huge with nearly 3.5 billion denizens of planet earth involved with their wire&plastic devices of global info deluge, even though real-world personal relationships are well-demonstrated as psychologically protective against those feelings and behaviors. And the association could be self-selective — people suffering mental health issues may be trying to use social media to feel better.
It could also be that adolescents and young adults—who are already inclined to compare themselves with their peers—are having a difficult time separating fact from self-promotion on these platforms.
"Especially if someone is in a more vulnerable state, they [may get the impression from social media milieu] that everybody else is having a better, happier, more productive life than they are," [lead CRMTH researcher Brian A. Primack, MD, PhD] says. "It's very easy for people to feel worse in comparison."
And it may be that how social media is used matters.
"Two people might both use 2 hours of social media per day, but person A might just be looking at pictures of babies and puppies and clicking 'like,' whereas person B might be having angry interactions about politics, religion, and other hot-button topics," says Primack. "Obviously, the association of that same 2-hour time frame might be very different for them."
The CRMTH research correlates passive use with higher rates of depression compared to creating content and communicating with friends. Also, the larger number of media platforms used, the higher the risk for depression and anxiety. Yet,
Conversely, plenty of data suggest that social media [shows] considerable benefit when social support networks grow to help such groups as disabled persons or those with mental illnesses, and that social media can enhance self-esteem and improve overall health by promoting smoking cessation and better eating habits…
But extensive research by Ellen Selkie, MD, MPH, assistant professor of adolescent medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, finds that
communal experience can also foster shared trauma. [In her focus] on cyberbullying and the ways in which it confers negative mental health outcomes on both victims and perpetrators [she noted] that simply observing cyberbullying secondhand can have demonstrable psychological effects. It's something she has seen play out in her work with transgender youth, who must navigate their own negative interactions in life while also experiencing the secondary consequences of reading damaging sentiments directed at their peers.
"Teens are developmentally at a stage where they are creating their own identity and looking to peers and other people like them for guidance on what that identity is," Selkie says. "Having a threat to that identity can be very powerful in terms of their mental health."
From counseling and rehabilitation for teens and adults whose media use has destablized their lives, come reports that heavy users’ sense of identity, self-worth, and relationships are entangled with their tech use in a pattern echoing drug and alcohol addiction. And requiring comparable detox.
But because living in the 21st century and avoiding digital media is all but impossible, they eventually have to learn how to use their phones, computers, and other elements in a productive, healthy way, via a transitional program that can last 4-9 months.
That’s a daunting prospect! A recent NewYorker book review, “Can Brain Science Help Us Break Bad Habits?” is captioned,
Studies suggest that relying on will power is hopeless. Instead, we must find strategies that don’t require us to be strong.
...In the modern era, habits have become a significant area of scientific inquiry. ...What about will power? Marketers flatter our sense of agency with slogans like “Just Do It” (Nike) and “Declare Your Path” (New Balance). Much popular psychology, too, bolsters our belief in self-control...
In “Good Habits, Bad Habits” ... social psychologist Wendy Wood ... sees the task of sustaining positive behaviors and quelling negative ones as involving an interplay of decisions and unconscious factors. Our minds ... have “multiple separate but interconnected mechanisms that guide behavior.” But we are aware only of our decision-making ability … and that may be why we overestimate its power....
...A study of self-control among college students bears out this hypothesis. The students were told to report every time they thought, “Oops, I shouldn’t do this”—for instance, when they stayed up too late, overslept, overate, or procrastinated. They were most successful at adopting productive behaviors not when they resolved to do better, or distracted themselves from temptation, but when they altered their environment. Instead of studying on a couch in a dorm, with a TV close by, they went to the library. They ate better when they removed junk food from the dorm refrigerator.
...the crux of her book’s thesis [is that] the path to breaking bad habits lies not in resolve but in restructuring our environment in ways that sustain good behaviors. Wood cites the psychologist Kurt Lewin, who argued that behavior was influenced by “a constellation of forces” analogous to gravity or to the fluid dynamics that make a river run faster or slower. Those forces work depending on where you are, who’s around you, the time of day, and your recent actions. We achieve situational control, paradoxically, not through will power but by finding ways to take will power out of the equation.
The central force for eliminating bad habits, according to Wood, is “friction”: if we can make bad habits more inconvenient, then inertia can carry us in the direction of virtue, without ever requiring us to be strong….
...The tendency of companies to act as our enablers was extensively examined in Charles Duhigg’s best-seller “The Power of Habit” (2012)… Examining corporate efforts to capitalize on habit formation… Duhigg, like Wood, sees habitual routines as being driven by cues and rewards [including industries that have] “created a craving...”
Wood advises us to come up with new rewards as substitutes for the ones [that get us stuck].
Selkie finds that when parents feel concern, her adolescent patients are usually responsive when she asks about their social media use. They express relief with recommendations to charge their devices someplace other than the bedroom, for example, in order to get less disrupted sleep, that “it builds upon instincts that they already have.” So, Selkie usually advises parents to ask their kids
about their social media use; whether they're struggling with depression or anxiety; how often they use these platforms; and whether they've ever felt unsafe while using them, which can lead to discussions about cyberbullying….
"Kids have a good sense of how social media might play into their own personal struggles," she says. "By virtue of them knowing better than a lot of parents about how the technology works, they're able to use that to their advantage."
...Yet even the most well-intentioned parents or clinicians can find themselves facing the unreceptive glare of a teenager who is being told that something that dominates nearly all facets of their social life is potentially harmful to them. Selkie says this is why it's particularly important to move away from the narrative that has been routinely propagated about social media: that teenagers are to blame for their own over-reliance on it.
"If we do that, we're in danger of blaming teens for depression and anxiety without taking into account a lot of other things that might be happening.
That’s what adults can do for youngsters to help with problems that come with high media use or are made worse that way, from other things that are happening.
Should adults look to kids for help in turn when anxiety and depression looks connected with communal online trauma, fear, and rage? Maybe we should try to be adults for ourselves, and develop better instincts too, as Ocasio-Cortez has, despite the seductions of over-using social media.
Of course, the irony of where we’re reading this can’t be lost on any of us. ;-) But readers who know me know what I’m going to say can be new rewards that supplant the cravings the online media corporations capitalize on addicting us to:
- Care about cleaner air in the world? Use your electronic device to find a local organization with a track-record for planting trees in the world right around you (not only for the leaves to the clean the air, but to fight desertification including of the urban kind, with it’s shade to conserve moisture in the soil and remediate heat). Put yr smartfone in your pocket and go volunteer at that organization for the season when they plant trees, or the season their speakers go talk to classes in grade-schools or fraternal lodges or wherever. And et cetera.
- Care about the homeless? Use your device to find a local organization with a track-record for partnering with the fire-department to bring portable showers to homeless people, or a local organization that makes burritos in church basements and brings them to homeless encampments on Sundays, put yr smartfone in your pocket, and go ask them what you can do to help their success.
- Care about reproductive rights? Use the ‘fone to find a local organization with a track-record for helping girls and women reach free clinics or abortion clinics, and reach home again and have help within reach if anything goes wrong; and local organizations that help guys get vasectomies, too. Put yr fone in your pocket and go offer to be a driver every few weeks, or a protective escort, or whatever they need ordinary folks to do for reproductive rights to succeed in your own town. ABORTION 'DESERTS' LIST
- Care about hunger relief? Use the fone to find a local organization collecting extra food from grocery stores, restaurants and hotels, put fone in pocket, go there, and ask to be put on a collection team a few nights a month.
- Care about public libraries? If you do, you already know where they are in your town. Put your fone in yr pocket, and go volunteer to shelve books, or learn to teach adult literacy, or tutor underachieving low-income students, or read stories to kids.
- Care about the aged and shut-in disabled people? Find the local meals on wheels organization, and arrange to deliver to just a couple and visit an hour to help with their housework or trash around outside.
- Care about pets and people? Find the local organization with a track-record for bringing therapy service-animals to old-age homes and hospitalized kids, and ask what you can do to help reach even more.
- Care about divisiveness and bigotry and stereotypes? Find the local interfaith council and join up to bring people together in cultural events they can share and enjoy each other’s heritage in.
- Care about real things really happening? Use yr smartfone or computer to get creative, find local organizations with a track record for achievement in worthwhile doings, apprentice yourself to them, pour your sweat equity into the world, and watch the friendships and great feelings blossom with what you accomplish together, like cactus flowers after the rain.