Can Social Media be the cause of Depression? Here’s everything you need to know

In today’s world, who isn’t addicted to social media? All of us are glued to our phones most of the time. Without realizing the harmful effects of social media, we continue to overuse it.

By Aashna Jain

Updated on May 04, 2019 | 10:03 PM IST | 2.7M

Social media can sometimes be a boon as well as a curse. We all know that social media affects our mental health in some way but we do not know how. Majority of us use social media applications. With the growing popularity of the internet, depression cases have steadily risen. There is a strong link between depression and social media. A study shows that, teenage and young adults who spend most of their time on social media were shown to have subsequently higher rate of depression than those who spent least time.

Social Media

How does Social Media cause Depression?

In today’s generation, we spend more time connecting with people electronically rather than meeting in person. Despite the popularity of social media platforms and the rapidity with which they’ve inserted themselves into our lives, we do not see how it affects our behaviors, our social relationships and most importantly our mental health.

Our minds are being brain hacked through social media. We follow people, compare their lifestyle with ours and consider ourselves imperfect. The likes, comments and notifications we receive through social media create positive feelings of acceptance. When we do not get this, we feel lonely, anxious and bad about ourselves.

Social Media and Depression

Research shows that the feelings of happiness, sadness, loneliness and anger are passed to an individual through social media. The emotional state of a person is easily manipulated by social media. Social media uses powerful algorithms to serve content to its users. They provide content that is more likely to engage and interact so users stay online for a longer period of time. This creates a bubble for the users. They see the same content and rarely see outside of it.

People fail to understand that the lives they see on social media are reel lives. We post only positive and important content. So, when we see these reel lives of people we compare ourselves to them. This causes feeling of shame, irrelevance and inferiority. It is also a source of cyber-bullying and this can have fatal consequences.