Heavy Social Media Users 'Trapped In Endless Cycle of Depression' (independent.co.uk)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: The more time young adults spend on social media, the more likely they are to become depressed, a study has found. Of the 19 to 32-year-olds who took part in the research, those who checked social media most frequently throughout the week were 2.7 times more likely to develop depression than those who checked least often. The 1,787 US participants used social media for an average 61 minutes every day, visiting accounts 30 times per week. Of them a quarter were found to have high indicators of depression. "One strong possibility is that people who are already having depressive symptoms start to use social media more, perhaps because they do not feel the energy to drive to engage in as many direct social relationships," said Dr. Brian Primack, director of Pitt's Center for Research on Media, Technology and Health. "People who engage in a lot of social media use may feel they are not living up to the idealized portraits of life that other people tend to present in their profiles. [...] This would be concerning, because it would imply that there is a potential vicious circle: people who become depressed may turn to social media for support, but their excessive engagement with it might only serve to exacerbate their depression."

Comments

Speak for yourself! (Part 1 of 12)

[HumanWiki]

I was trapped in depression cycles back in USENET!!!! Pssh.. social media...

Maybe they are mixing up the cause and the effect

[dunkelfalke]

It could just as well be that depressed people feel lonely and try to connect to others at least this way.

chicken

[turkeydance]

or egg?

Lack of hobbies

[pak9rabid]

I'd be willing to bet that the correlation here is due to these people not having many, if any, hobbies, so they spend a lot of their days browsing social media and not getting out a whole lot. This, combined with the likelihood of seeing their friends on social media going out and doing fun and interesting things probably compounds the problem.

Re:Lack of hobbies

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm willing to bet you've never been depressed and are just making random guesses. You're got it backwards. I've been so depressed I've attempted suicide twice (yeah, I failed at life and failed at death). When you're deeply depressed, nothing feels good. There is no such thing as happiness, at least none that lasts more than a single moment. Everything, everything takes far more effort to do and everything is pointless. Hobbies take too much work, too much effort, and you get no enjoyment out of them. Worse, you may remembering enjoying it but continuing those action no longer brings that enjoyment or excitement. If you used to have hobbies you won't continue them because they're all pointless extra work with no benefits.

Turning to social media makes you feel like you're doing something without having to spend any energy actually doing something. You can pretend you're being social (and why has society deemed that's the thing to be? Other cultures prefer quiet self-reflection rather than gossiping about nothing), catching up with people, making connections, etc... as you get further behind in whatever it was you actually need to be doing. Now you've got even more stuff that you've failed to do so you get more and more depressed. Maybe you're hoping one of your 'friends' will notice and help you out, but you don't have the willpower to ask directly and most people will say something insulting like "why don't you smile more" or "go have fun"*. When you're incapable of feeling any enjoyment you can't "go have fun" no matter what you try to do.

So yes, depressed people don't have hobbies. But they're not depressed because they don't have hobbies, they don't have hobbies because they're depressed. The world is better off without you, so where and why are you going to find and spend the energy to build something when you're just going to fuck it up anyway? At least on social media you could potentially help someone else. I wasted my time reading Facebook and trying to help people on r/depression and the suicide watch reddit forms instead of helping myself.

*Technically you do need to do those things, but simply stating them is fucking insulting as hell and most people don't tell you the how. Why aren't I smiling? Because I have nothing to smile about you asshole. I don't have some perfect happy little life like you do. Why should I have to put on a show for you just so you can pretend the world is a wonderful place full of happy people? Instead of telling someone to enjoy something, take them out to a park or a zoo, someplace outside during a sunny day. Don't ask them to go, plan the entire trip yourself then tell them you want them along and they're going and don't take any insults personally. Take them along for the ride and don't force them to make any decisions ("I've never eaten at XYZ, how about we eat there"? instead of "Where do you want to eat?"). If you just told someone to 'man up' you better have done the same.

Re:Ignorance

[Kohath]

Aerobic exercise is good for depression.

Internet Depression

[JWSmythe]

In other news, people who frequently use the Internet see how stupid most other people are.

Representatives from the National Institute of Health (NIH), United States Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) all recommend avoiding interactions with stupid people.

Most importantly, avoid places both real and online, where they may congregate. Specifically mentioned as such dangerously stupid locations are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google Plus, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine and LinkedIn.

"While you may think that you can help guide some stupid people away from their stupidity, it will only hurt you. Many very intelligent people have tried, driving them to believe this planet is occupied by absolute morons. There are other studies being performed to determine if we have passed the point of idiocracy."

Re:See? Told you so!

[supremebob]

It also doesn't help that everyone seems to post an idealized Brady Bunch version of their family on Facebook. The pictures of the kids are always clean and happy, and the adults are always promotions and shiny new cars. When the reader's lives can't live up to these unrealistic expectations, it just makes their depression worse.

Not surprising

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

All of the oversharing of the faux 'my-life-is-super-awesome" lifestyles portrayed would be enough to depress anyone, and add to that the sheer volume of brain-numbing bullshit ("press 'Like' to get this child a new kidney!") and it's no wonder that many people's mental processes become clogged with Facebook sludge.

I noticed this effect years ago when I realized that many of the Facebook addicts I knew were constantly being "one upped" by the constant stream of useless crap and downright false garbage that they tuned in to read on a minute-by-minute basis. Facebook didn't make them feel better, it made them feel worse- lonely, boring, and mundane. They couldn't brag hard enough to make themselves feel good.

I called this effect "Facebook Psychosis", and now it seems I was on to something.

If everyone you know is constantly bragging about how AWESOME and FANTASTIC their life is and they have pictures to "prove" it, who wouldn't be discouraged by the "ordinary" life that you, a mere mortal, seems to lead?

But it's not Facebook's fault per se, any more than it's the bottle of Tequila's fault when someone gets drunk and then crashes their car. It's a contributing cause, but the drunk driver is the one who fucked up.

Re:See? Told you so!

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

So-called 'social media' is no substitute for actual interaction, preferably face-to-face, and is just enabling socially avoidant people from getting over their awkwardness and anxiety of social situations.

^^^^THIS.

"Social" media seems to be creating a generation of emotionally inept and insecure people who simply do not know how to interact with others except on the most shallow of levels. Most millennials seem to hate talking on the phone and the reason they often give is that it's "too immediate and too personal". They want to avoid human-to-human interaction and send a tweet instead. Anything to create some emotional distance. No wonder their relationships are all fucked up and mostly short-lived and shallow.

It should really be called "anti-social" media or maybe "contra-social" media, because it's anything but social as far as I can tell.

Re:See? Told you so!

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

It also doesn't help that everyone seems to post an idealized Brady Bunch version of their family on Facebook.

Exactly. Everyone is showing their highlight reels publicly but privately living their real life from the bits on the cutting room floor.

Thanks for speaking up

[Latent Heat]

Thanks for speaking up and telling us what depression is really like.

There are times when I tell myself "I feel so depressed!" but it is nothing like what you experience. There are many things I feel unhappy about, many things I am anxious about, but when my primary-care doctor asks me if I am depressed, I say, well no, there are projects at work as well as things at home that I enjoy doing and look forward to very much, so I don't think that I am depressed.

Thanks again for telling us what depression is really like and offering ideas of how we can help friends or family in that condition.

Re: Maybe they are mixing up the cause and the eff

[koomba]

I know this is Slashdot and all, so the suggestion to rtfa is somewhat ridiculous, but the lead researcher actually addressed that very point. She said that could very well be the case, and they weren't making a claim one way or the other in that regard.