Using Multiple Forms of Media At Once Correlates With Depression, Anxiety

pigrabbitbear writes "A new study (abstract) from Michigan State University shows that media multitasking exhibits a strong correlation with social anxiety and depression. Importantly, the direction of causality remains to be seen: Does multi-tasking make us more anxious and depressed? Or, as the study's leader, Mark W. Becker, an assistant professor of psychology, put it in an email, 'are depressed and anxious [people] turning toward media multitasking as a form of distraction?' The results of this study aren't conclusive in that regard, he says. But they're an important step. 'While that question will not be easy to answer, it is worth pursing because the practical implications of the findings depend on the causal direction,' he said."

Comments

Also called "multiple-tab syndrome"

[PopAndGame]

There was this old study on how using multiple tabs while browsing means you're depressed. It basically said girls are more normal in this regard because they just have their Facebook page open and AT MOST browse just one other website for reading. At the same time nerds were thought depressed because they couldn't keep themselves on one page but kept switching to many different pages, on tabs. Might have some truth to reality, especially if looking at the geeks I know.

Re: Also called "multiple-tab syndrome"

[Dupple]

Watching old Dr Whofrom the 80's and commenting on /. From my phone. I wouldn't say I'm depressed, but that behaviour is pretty sad!

Re: Also called "multiple-tab syndrome"

[Zordak]

That's just sad. How can posting on /. be even momentarily more interesting than old Dr. Who from the 80s? Unless you're watching Colin Baker, in which case I can understand it.

Re: Also called "multiple-tab syndrome"

[Dupple]

Trial of a time lord - Colin baker. My only defence is Peri

Re:Also called "multiple-tab syndrome"

[sinij]

Clearly, the main problem was the post above you was that the poster was multi-tabbig his media.

Re:Also called "multiple-tab syndrome"

[Anonymous Coward]

Or perhaps it is because the smart people see how much of a depressing shithole the world is and the "ignorance is bliss" types don't?

They live in their little closed-off worlds (facebook, quite literally), while the geeks all read about, well, shit like this, on our slashdot, instead of the new galactic empire agreements between 2 civilizations or how our new Titan-base got a new colony established, or to be more (sadly) realistic, the new processors from Intel or how much more Microsoft is suffering for decades of torture they forced on the industry.

Re:Also called "multiple-tab syndrome"

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I have oodles of social anxiety. It started long before teh Internets.

Not sure when it started. As early as first grade ca. 1972, I recall a tendency towards incendiary embarrassment coupled with a feeling I was surrounded by idiots.

Re:Also called "multiple-tab syndrome"

[beelsebob]

I don't really get what's unexpected about this. One of the well known effects of depression is a lack of interest in, well... anything. People who are depressed go out desperately searching for things that interest them, generally not finding it. Surely both having multiple tabs open, and trying to watch TV at the same time as reading shit on the internet is simply a symptom of that search for something to care about.

That is, my hypothesis is that the causation is depression causes multitasking for information... Not multitasking with media causes depression.

Re:Also called "multiple-tab syndrome"

[Forty Two Tenfold]

desperately searching for things that interest them, generally not finding it

No, you don't get it. We need distraction.

Re:Also called "multiple-tab syndrome"

[Synerg1y]

I'm just going to throw this out there... since I don't have any points to mod down

Internet habits can be an expression of mental state... but let's think about this... so IS EVERYTHING ELSE. Your style of clothes, mannerisms, speech patterns, ALL of those stem from mental state. I can have 20-30 tabs open at a time while I'm writing code, does that make me depressed? no, paid? yes.

Some people put the TV on to say drown out external noise and then focus in on what they're doing on their computer, a TV is easier to focus with than the contractor's saw at your neighbor's house.

I can go on and on with examples, but let's just say these studies have no merit.

Re: Also called "multiple-tab syndrome"

[Zordak]

Doctor Who was pretty terrible by the time Sophie joined the show, but she's the best.

I actually thought Sylvester McCoy was a pretty good Doctor. The real problem was that they were trying to make the Doctor More Than Just an Ordinary Time Lord(tm). He didn't need to be any more awesome than he already was. But anyway, McCoy himself was probably the -- well, hmm, let's see:

1. Tom Baker
2. David Tenant
3. Patrick Troughton
4/5. Chris Eccleston & Peter Davison (tied)
6. Jon Pertwee
7. Matt Smith
8/9. William Hartnell/Sylvester McCoy (tied)
10. Colin Baker
11. Paul McGann? Who's that?

Okay, so he was like the 9th best doctor out of 11. But I actually draw a big, fat line between 9th place and 10th place. The top 9 were all very enjoyable. Colin Baker---well, it wasn't all his fault that the producers screwed up the character. The 1997 TV movie was embarrassing.

Re:Also called "multiple-tab syndrome"

[anubi]

Yes. as humans, we are NOT identical. Our physical traits vary. So do our psychological traits. Its not just us, either. Talk to anyone who has raised animals. I have raised kittens. Some kittens are loveable. Some are skittish. Some come out just plain wild.

I found out about this several years ago when new management took over at the old aerospace company I used to work for. A serious clash of personality types resulted as my former supervisors ( old-school engineers ) were replaced by men of the suit and tie... MBA's.

I did not last long. We had completely different value systems. I was the artist type and wanted it done just right; they were business oriented and were optimizing for maximum quarterly profit.

I was laid off. Just as good. I am pretty sure I would have gone crazy if I had been kept around, as I was too stubborn to just walk away.

I was convinced I was crazy, so I went to the local community college and talked to the dean of psychology, and told him I wanted to be evaluated - and I flat did not trust anyone in the medical profession who had a fiduciary incentive in the outcome.

I told him my story, and he recognized what happened. He set up a array of tests ( Myers-Briggs, Keirsey, and a couple others ) that presented hundreds of situations and queried how I would handle it. All on the computer.

It took me several days to go through the long version ( the shorter versions are available on the internet - the ones I got took several hours each to complete ).

It turns out psychologists have been able to classify personality types into different categories, just as hair color, eye color, skin color have categories. I am strongly INTP and have asperger traits. Its not a malfunction as much as it is a descriptor. It explained why I have absolutely no interest in sports, or why I would consider a thermodynamics book far more interesting than a bestseller novel.

I think a lot of us here on Slashdot have similar attributes, as this site - by its nature and content - caters to our type. I would bet few of us give much of a damm about the Super Bowl, but would find a new way of lighting a building worth a read.

We think "they" are nuts, crazy, completely oblivious to reality. "They" think the same about us.

Take Malthus... he talked hundreds of years ago about mankind reproducing so much he overshoots the capacity of this planet to support us - resulting in a massive die-off. I fear this too. Or something called "Peak Oil". I've seen the production curves and thoroughly understand the logistic equation the depletion curves are based on, and it scares the hell out of me. Yet "normal people" seem to take this in stride.

Who is to say who is crazy?

Re:Also called "multiple-tab syndrome"

[nobodie]

Thank you for the anecdote, almost a one to one with me, fortunately one thing I studied extensively was conspiracy theory and how they came about (the psych of conspiracy theory) so I generally understand that idiots run the world and couldn't conspire their way out of a wet paper bag. That has saved me a lot of agony and fear.

But it is frustrating that almost no one else seems to understand it.

Depression causes multitasking

[Anonymous Coward]

I strongly believe that the cause-effect relationship is that depressed/anxious people are using more social media. Why? It's an attempt to find something or someone worthwhile to alleviate the feelings of boredom and/or loneliness.

Happy confident people will find some task or project or following and happily stick to it for a while. Depressed, lonely, scatterbrained people will turn to things like social media to try to find whatever it is that they don't know they're looking for.

This is my belief..... of course, I might not know what I'm talking about.

Re:Depression causes multitasking

[sinij]

Research shows that long-term even blind and quadriplegic people report average happiness. If we extrapolate these findings to your facebook predicament -it is likely that in the long run you will adapt to having your mother as the only facebook friend and will return to average happiness.

Re:Depression causes multitasking

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's just be clear. Depression and feeling depressed are not the same thing. They actually have little in common. Depression is a condition of extended psychomotor retardation that typically lasts 6 months if treated and 12 months if untreated. Many people with depression don't always feel sadness. In particular, men are more likely to be irritable than sad.

I know that it is popular to compare depression with feeling down, grieving, disappointment, etc. This only does people with actual depression a disservice because depression is not something something that can be fixed on a time scale of hours, days, or weeks.

Re:Depression causes multitasking

[macbeth66]

You must be really be depressed if your own mother won't friend you.

I suspect there's some level of feedback

[Zordak]

IANAPsychologist, but intuitively I suspect that there's some feedback going on. A person is unhappy or lonely, so he seeks stimulus from multiple media inputs to try to fill the emptiness. It's gratifying for a while, but he quickly reaches diminishing returns and the endorphin rush peters out. Then he feels more depressed and lonely, so he seeks even more stimulus, and so on.

Re:I suspect there's some level of feedback

[sinij]

Is IANAP a consequence of turning IANAL into IAAL?

Makes sense to me

[kid-noodle]

So, with the big flashing red caveat that this is entirely anecdotal and drawn from personal experience, I recall 'spamming' my senses with as many inputs as possible (lying in bed simultaneously listening to music, a film on, reading a book, eating seriously high fat/salt/sugar foodstuffs, etc.) quite a lot while I was in the deeper throes of reasonably severe depression. Retrospectively it seems like an attempt to blot out as much of reality as I could, and drown out the sound of my own thoughts.
Funny things, brains.

Re:Makes sense to me

[kid-noodle]

Hey, AC - go get help, get medicated and use the time you are medicated to do CBT (because the combination of the two has a good success rate), start jogging (because annoyingly, this too has a good success rate), eat more healthily (specific benefits of this are, I believe, a bit more contentious, but cooking properly is a great and positive activity irregardless), and while you're at it, identify what in your life and yourself you need to change to protect yourself from being depressed. Then use that to actually make the changes - this process took me about five years, but became progressively more worth it and easier. There's no magic bullet, it is hard work, and if you are susceptible to depression you probably need to keep at it in a small way forever.
This doesn't work for everybody (some people do seem to just have bad chemistry), and really isn't easy, but it did for me.

Perhaps the hardest bit is actually getting help in the first place, it took me months and the damage to my life was pretty extensive. Then one day I had a breakdown and sat weeping on my kitchen floor, because I couldn't cope with choosing between frozen pies for dinner and thought "Shit, I can't fix this by myself.". A mere three weeks later I'd actually gone to one of the several doctor's appointments I made.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Don't spam your brain - do something about the sadness and pain.

Re:Makes sense to me

[kid-noodle]

Good for you!
I was extremely leery of anti-depressants, but I suspect without them I would in fact be dead. They made me feel a whole other kind of awful (shakes, nausea, no libido, etc. ad nauseam), but did get me to a point where I could actively work on healing myself, and changing my life to protect me in future. I was able to cope without them after not so long - they should in almost all cases be used like a splint for the brain, and discarded when some semblance of normal neurochemistry is restored.

Re:Makes sense to me

[ArhcAngel]

I went through numerous prescription AD and they all made a bad situation worse. Then I discovered 5-HTP. I noticed improvement after the very first dose. Obviously everyone is going to be different but for anyone going through depression I recommend giving it a try.

Re:Makes sense to me

[Hatta]

Hey, AC - go get help, get medicated

Medication doesn't actually work for most people. A 2008 meta-analysis of all clinical trials involving SSRIs, including trials the author had to file FOIA requests to get, shows that SSRIs provide no clinically significant benefit to those with a Hamilton Rating below 23. That's "very severe" depression. Side effects of course occur no matter how depressed you are.

That was 4 years ago, no one has since refuted these findings. I've actually sought treatment for depression in the past couple years. I was given a score of 15 and was offered SSRIs. I asked the psychiatrist how she could ethically offer an addictive drug with many side effects when the best science available showed them to be no more effective than harmless glucose. She had no answer, except to say that in her experience they were effective. As if there was no reason to do blinded, placebo controlled studies.

The only conclusion I can reach from this is that psychiatric treatment for depression in all but the most severe cases is a con. If you can still feed yourself, get your ass to work, and sleep at night there's nothing psychiatry can do for you. You might as well rub a crystal on your forehead.

Re:Makes sense to me

[kid-noodle]

I was at the time doing my degree in psychology, the consensus (at least here in the UK), was very clear - SSRIs can be very effective, but only in combination with counselling or something similar. Unfortunately, they don't get used like that. Counselling, and even relatively 'quick fix' type therapies like CBT are staggeringly expensive and time consuming vs. pills. Sadly this means the prescription is the solution option tends to win out.

I do think there's a lot of debate to be had about the efficaciousness of SSRIs in general, they are widely misused and you're quite right to point out that in a lot of cases they really won't help. I also think that the statistical methodology used by pharma to demonstrate their drugs work is misleading at best, and probably outright deceptive (Ben Goldacre has much to say on this subject). However! In this context, I can only offer my anecdotal experience. The greatest benefit to my mental health was certainly not the medication, but the other things I mentioned.
I would take issue with your last statement though - I don't think your assertion is logically sound.

Re:Makes sense to me

[Anonymous Coward]

The more and more research you do into anti-depressants the more and more harmful they appear to be. I've been depressed for over 16 years (~10 to 26) and have attempted suicide a couple times (left the result up to chance and got lucky). Last year I finally when in for a free session and got diagnosed with double-depression, among other things. I hate taking meds/drugs. I spent all summer researching depression in an attempt to convince myself to start anti-depressants this fall. Instead it convinced me to never take them even once.

Depression used to be something many people would go through once or twice in a life time. It lasted around a year then the person got over it. Nowadays, it's a lifelong, disabling illness that puts you out of work and onto welfare. Anti-depressants are addictive in the sense that your body adjusts (fights against the drug's effects) and you have to take more and more of them for the same effects. Eventually one drug stops working and you have to switch. Once you stop an anti-depressant you get depressed again. People see this as the drug was working and go back on it. However, the withdraw effects exactly match the original symptoms and most people don't know these drugs have any withdraw effects! They get cured normally in around a year but stay on the drugs because they don't notice. These drugs screw with how your brain operations on a chemical level and eventually leads to brain damage. You slowly lose the ability to maintain emotional stability which means you'll start taking more and strong drugs. Then you'll take more drugs to reduce their side effects. People on this path die 20 years earlier than their peers.

The good clinical trials show no benefit of anti-depressants over active placebos (placebos which cause side effects).

The best treatments for depression is exercise, sunlight (sounds stupid but it actually matters), eating the right foods (more fruit and veggies, less meat protein and processed sugar), CBT, and quality social interaction and support. If you can do these things, please skip the drugs. Your life will be so much better in the long run.

I'm still deeply depressed, but I'm slowly working through it on my own. No additional costs, no additional side effects, and no one around me knows. I still can't see any future worth living for me, but the constant wanting and looking for chances die is gone.

I'm not providing sources. You'll learn more if you go research things yourself.

Re:Makes sense to me

[Khyber]

"use the time you are medicated to do CBT"

Being medicated is probably the best time for cock and ball torture anyways.

Re:Makes sense to me

[swalve]

Be careful with that stuff, the crash if you miss a dose can be brutal.

What? No Invalid Causation?

[edibobb]

It's really nice to see an article on correlation without invalid conclusions of causation. This means that /. readers are more scientifically literate than the rest of the world.

The causality choices aren't mutually exclusive

[hamjudo]

Depressed people are also likely to self medicate with cigarettes or alcohol. And using cigarettes or alcohol sometimes leads to depression. In some people, it leads to a positive feedback loop.

Re:The causality choices aren't mutually exclusive

[PhxBlue]

In some people, it leads to a positive feedback loop.

It doesn't sound very positive to me. *Rimshot*

Re:The causality choices aren't mutually exclusive

[arielCo]

'What are you doing here?' he said to the drunkard whom he found sitting silently in front of a collection of bottles, some empty and some full.
'I am drinking,' answered the drunkard lugubriously.
'Why are you drinking?' the little prince asked.
'In order to forget,' replied the drunkard.
'To forget what?' enquired the little prince, who was already feeling sorry for him.
'To forget that I am ashamed,' the drunkard confesed, hanging his head.
'Ashamed of what?' asked the little prince who wanted to help him.
'Ashamed of drinking!' concluded the drunkard, withdrawing into total silence.
And the little prince went away, puzzled.
'Grown-ups really are very, very odd,' he said to himself as he continued his journey.

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Amateur Hour

[globaljustin]

I'd say this is pseudoscience but...I'm trying not to feed my inner troll...

This is definitely shoddy science work. Their definition of 'media' is one of many examples...

I've researched media usage, media usefulness, geospatial correlations, etc. in an academic setting and the definition this study uses for 'media' is...depressingly narrow.

'media' is a book, billboard...anything that has symbols. Usually researchers narrow the language to 'digital media'...but that requires a more refined, less salacious theory...which doesn't get headlines.

Don't even get me started on how research studies like this use the word 'multitasking'

Look, IAAS and this research is garbage...move along...

True fact

[Charliemopps]

Slashdot depresses me. So does CNN, Redit... It's like a trifecta of misery. I try to keep Pandora open to cheer me up but then it decides to play me a Metallica song and I'm right back to being miserable.

A few words of caution

[meetpi]

Given that I can't afford to pay the publisher's ludicrous $51 for 24 hours access to this paper, I have to glean information about the study from the abstract and summaries.

This study is, at best, a preliminary study. The researchers use a small sample size which they generalise to a large population (they sample 319 people) and they are not using a random sample (they used college undergrads, presumably self-selected). So, basically, what this tells us is that there is some correlation between certain kinds of media use behaviours with *possibly* depressed/anxious undergraduates at Michigan State. It is highly inaccurate statistically speaking to generalise these results to the general population. At best, this study might suggest that there is phenomena here that is worthy of further examination by a proper study.

I'm not criticising the researchers: preliminary studies like this are the first step to getting funding for a more robust study, and they're not claiming anything earth-shattering or being sensationalist. But /. readers need to be aware that this is preliminary research, and does not mean what the headline suggests it does. A better headline would be something like "Preliminary research suggests there may be value in studying the relationship between multiple media use and depression"

On a related note, I wish psychologists would stop using students as guinea pigs and then publishing papers on the results. We already know waaay too much about college undergraduates.

Depression - Distraction

[Ira Sponsible]

Add my anecdotal evidence to the pile. In my own case, I have been depressed on account of the amazing suckitude of my life, and have deliberately turned to the distraction of multiple forms of media (books, TV, music, interwebs, beer, etc.), often simultaneously. Recognizing the external factors of my life that make it suck are beyond my control, and thinking about these things leads directly to depression, it is only reasonable to prevent thinking about these things by occupying my mind with anything else at all.