It is the last semester of my high school year and I am sitting on my phone, not paying attention to my teacher and scrolling through Instagram. I see these beautiful girls, skinny with a whole lot of money and I look down at myself. I do not see this beautiful girl anymore, I just see an average girl and I start to think about all the past times when someone made fun of me, when someone rejected me, when I just was not good enough. Every once in a while, someone feels this way to and unfortunately many teenagers feel this way today. The constant need to look at our phones and our social media platforms has created this type of mental divide in our lives. We value the social life more than the real life and never remember that these social media people are putting on an act. We see these people and we think to ourselves, why can I not look like this or why can I not have this much money. We live a life where social media has taken over our lives and is affecting our mental health in a negative way.
When social media was just starting people were not as addicted because there were many flaws and they were just worried that it was something new and dangerous. Now after many years and many new updates we solely rely on social media as a way to communicate, and show the world who we are. From posting pictures and tweets, to just scrolling and looking at what other people are posting we don’t understand how much it is affecting our brains and daily lives. Jill Savage Scharff conducted a research study to find out how people are reacting to being treated for mental health problems over the phone or online on there laptops. Being a doctor himself he gathered intel from his clients and with the help of other psychotherapists and psychoanalyststo find out the truth behind the question. As they all conducted research he would also ask his current patients how they would feel about online treatment. He writes that, “Some patients comment that this is the only place in their lives where they allow themselves to be free of technology, speaking to its nearly constant presence in their lives.” (Savege Scharff 3) Some believe that it might be helpful in the future but some see it as a way to fully disconnect from face to face conversations. They come to his office and turn off their phones, in hope to have some peace and quiet from the social life. With a consent need to check social platforms many want to have a time where they can just forget about it all and just talk to a person who is right in front of them. Many suffer from mental health problems and when they come to a point when they realize they need help they mostly want to talk to someone but are worried of leaving their homes or seeing people. These people could benefit from doing therapy online but they will still be home well in reach of their social medias and other social platforms that have drove them here. Gillian Fergie, Kate Hunt, and Shona Hilton studied these methods and had asked many people of what they though about online therapy. They stated in their article that, “Many participants, including a number of ‘prosumers’, expressed concerns about being perceived as “the girl/boy who has diabetes/mental health issues” or as someone who was always “moaning on” about their illness.” (Fergie, et al) Many are worried that if they do online therapy or group therapy people will see them as attention seekers, people who just want to constantly complain about their lives because they have nothing better to do. So they just stay at home on their phones doing nothing about their problems and continue to look at social platforms.
People live on their phones, they spend hours a day on their phones, they spend hours reading posts about everything that is going on in the world today. In an article by Andrea Petersen in the wall street journal she says that, “It is unclear why the rates of mental-health problems seem to be increasing among college students. Therapists point to everything from the economy and rising cost of tuition to the impact of social media and a so-called helicopter-parenting style that doesn’t allow adolescents to experience failure.” She talks about these problems and how they all correlate with one another. Because college students in this society are always talking over social media they are talking about everything. A constant conversation about what is going on in the college, what the college costs, and how everyone’s opinions are different from everyone else’s. We see this a great way of talking but don’t understand that it brings so much stress to our lives. These so-called helicopter parents have raised many students to believe everything they do it right, that their bubble life is perfect and what they think is the correct and most important thing. When it comes down to moving into the dorms, paying thousands of dollars for tuition, or communicating with people you have class with their lives are shattered. They see these kids on social media that are complete opposites, either it be different cultures or different ways of dressing, or even different thoughts on the economic standing of the country, they don’t know how to react. They just lash out or stress themselves out that they don’t fit in, that they look different, think different, dress different, post different, and it creates a mental health disconnect. Andrea Petersen also states that, “Nationwide, 17% of college students were diagnosed with or treated for anxiety problems during the past year, and 13.9% were diagnosed with or treated for depression, according to a spring 2016 survey of 95,761 students by the American College Health Association.” Roughly 30% of students have some sort of mental health problem and one of the biggest factors is the constant need and use of social platforms that have been instilled in our brains. Students rely on these social platforms to sit in their beds and have conversations instead of getting dressed and sitting with a group of friends. Students can’t focus on anything for a long time because they are glued to there phones, to the constant need to check their phones. The constant worry that they will miss something so mundane as a salad posted by a famous celebrity. They worry more about social media and their attention to social media that they forget they are in college to learn and get a career. Hou Yubo and others in their article about social media addiction conducted a study to prove this point and to show how social media is really affecting or minds. They found that, “Study 1 showed that a self-rank measure of academic performance was negatively associated with social media addiction. This relation was not mediated by self-esteem. Study 2 further showed that an intervention to reduce social media addiction improved learning engagement and increased the time spent on learning outside the class.” These two different studies show and prove that because people are so addicted to social media they are putting everything else they do at risk of failure. People who were constantly using social media and could not put their phones away were struggling in school work. They couldn’t not focus on studies outside of the classroom because they had no control there. The people who were part of the intervention and were using social media less were more engaged, they were learning more, and reacting to the information around them even when they really didn’t need to.
We all see a more recent example with the social platform Instagram. Not too long ago they had encountered a technical issue and for a full day the app was not working. People couldn’t bare to spend a full day without this social platform. They sent in emails, posted snapchats and tweets, just bashing Instagram freaking out that they could not post anything or refresh their feeds. People were going crazy they couldn’t be up to date and they felt like they had nothing else to. We are so addicted to seeing posts and being part of the trend that over twenty-seven million people liked a picture of an egg just to beat Kylie Jenner’s most liked picture. It also doesn’t just affect teenagers, but the older generations. We see professors today who are in their thirties or forties and can’t focus on something for more than five minutes. We see professors who rather talk about some social post instead of actually teaching, or professors who talk about a messed-up slide for two hours. This all also affects how we are reacting to social media. We rather sit on our phones and go through the same one hundred posts then listen to a professor talk about a slide that isn’t working.
Every day millions of people wake up and look at their phones. They wake up to a bunch of texts from there so-called social media friends. They wake up a bunch of notifications from Instagram and twitter and snapchat. They rather lay in bed and go through all of this and see everything that they missed in the few hours that they slept then getting up and starting their days. Even though many people leave their phones, or turn off their notifications, or take a break from social media, they still have that constant feeling of not having enough information about what is going in the society, or not keeping up with the social trends. These platforms are embedded into our brains, we get updates about school closing on twitter, how people are striking against some cause, or what happened five blocks away on an app controlled by us. We live for the moment to open our phone and see something new, to see what was just released by Supreme or Louis Vuitton, to see what some rich celebrity is doing on their thirteenth vacation this year. We are addicted to this, we can’t live without this. We can’t focus in class, we believe that we aren’t worth enough because someone else is, we see ourselves as being poor or ugly or fat because other people aren’t, we rather stay at home and be to ourselves behind a screen instead of seeing our friends because we don’t know how to fit in anymore.
Social platforms have taken over society today. Everything is electronic, everything is being shared and posted. Everybody knows what is going on in a different part of the country. But people don’t know how their best friend of ten years is doing or feeling. People dont know how to not write without shorting words. People are going online to solve problems and sometimes it really helps us, but sometimes it just makes everything worse. Between self-diagnosis, or a diet that might hurt us in the long run. We are living in a world of technology but we are not using it in our benefit. We are looking at posts that make us upset, they make us insecure, and lose our attention spans. We are addicted to something so fake and just crazy to follow. We feel fake vibrations in our pockets when there isn’t one. We are addicted and ruining our mental health and created anxiety and depression and low self esteem.
Fergie, et al. “Social Media as a Space for Support: Young Adults’ Perspectives on Producing and Consuming User-Generated Content about Diabetes and Mental Health.” Social Science & Medicine, vol. 170, 2016, pp. 46–54.
Savege Scharff, Jill. Psychoanalysis Online: Mental Health, Teletherapy, and Training. Routledge, 2018.
Petersen, Andrea. “College Students Flood Mental-Health Centers.” Wall Street Journal, 2016, p. D.1.
Yubo Hou, et al. “Social Media Addiction: Its Impact, Mediation, and Intervention.” Cyberpsychology, vol. 13, no. 1, Mar. 2019, pp. 1–17. EBSCOhost, doi:10.5817/CP2019-1-4.