Summarize class resources
The first resource I would like to summarize is from childmind.org. This article presents that studies have shown that depression has increased over time in young teens, as well as suicide rates. The article goes on to explain that the studies suggest correlation more than causation and then presents a few theories as to why this is happening. Sleep deprivation, self-esteem loss, and perceived isolation are just a few of the things the article reports that could be linked to the skyrocket in teen depression. (https://childmind.org/article/is-social-media-use-causing-depression/)
The second resource is from allpsychologyschools.com. This is a compare/contrast article that details the benefits and harms of social media. On the one hand, social media can make some people feel inspired to improve their health, share the happy news, and keeps people in relationships feeling closer to one another than ever. However, social media can also leave people bombarded with negative news, make people lose sleep, and create jealousy in intimate relationships. (https://www.allpsychologyschools.com/psychology/social-media-psychology/)
The third resource is from the HuffPost. This article points out that social media without a doubt has influenced people’s mental illness, but highlights how people are beginning to use social media to turn that around for themselves and defy stigmas. HuffPost highlights important social media campaigns such as #WhatYouDontSee that have been created to encourage those who are struggling with mental health to come forward and share their stories and break the stigma against speaking out. Then the articles move on with multiple personal stories and comments, where the general theme is although social media is a great tool and in some ways can provide mental health help, it still is a dark place and can hurt them at the same time.
Finally, the last article from wired.com describes a new kind of social media app being worked on by Daniel Kahneman. He used his knowledge from psychology and the collective minds at Stack Overflow to create an app called Panoply. Panoply is an app that encourages you to log your experiences and practice mindfulness exercises revolving your life experiences. This way, when you have a dark thought such as “she didn’t look at me, she doesn’t like me” the app goes in with three waves, first with confirmation and sympathy, second with encouragement to re-analyze the situation, and the third to re-write the event in a positive light. Panoply was successful in its developmental trial and Daniel is now looking to upgrade and evolve Panoply in a project called Koko.
(https://www.wired.com/2015/04/social-network-designed-combat-depression/)
Questions
Is this kind of depression from social media a brand new kind of depression altogether?
Resources I Found
Multi-Task Learning for Mental Health using Social Media Text by Adrian Benton, Margaret
Mitchell, Dirk Hovy, 2017 https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.03538
The Future of Mental Health Care: peer-to-peer support and social media by J. A. Naslund, K.
- Aschbrenner, L. A. Marsch and S. J. Bartels, 2016
Discovering Shifts to Suicidal Ideation from Mental Health Content in Social Media by Munmun
De Choudhury, Emre Kiciman, Mark Dredze, Glen Coppersmith, Mrinal Kumar, 2016
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2858207
Social Media Obsession and Anxiety by Sarah Fader, 2018
https://adaa.org/social-media-obsession
Mental Health Discourse on Reddit: Self-Disclosure, Social Support, and Anonymity by Munmun
De Choudhury, Sushovan De, 2016
https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM14/paper/viewPaper/8075
Summarizing Two of the Articles
The first scientific article I am going to be referencing is Multi-Task Learning for Mental Health using Social Media Text by Adrian Benton, Margaret Mitchell, and Dirk Hovy. This article from 2017 lists the groundwork for estimating suicide risk and mental health using deep/machine learning via analysis of social media. “Our best MTL model predicts a potential suicide attempt, as well as the presence of atypical mental health, with AUC > 0.8.” In the end, they conclude that the tool is not quite yet ready, but could be essential for identifying a need for preventive care in the future. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.03538)
The second article is Social Media Obsession and Anxiety by Sarah Fader from 2018. This article outlines a new form of anxiety more specified as a social media anxiety disorder. This is anxiety that stems directly from social media addiction. This disorder can not only mentally affect you, but also physically because of staring at screens and craning your neck to look down at your phone. This disorder can cause symptoms that are similar to disorders like ADHD, paranoia disorder and depression. The article says that the best cure for this disorder is to put social media aside and go live in reality. (https://adaa.org/social-media-obsession)
How my Knowledge has Changed
Before reading into these articles, I would say I didn’t think the issue was as bad as it was. My depression and things that cause me to feel unstable are things that have been happening in my reality. So I never really considered that social media and the internet could be so toxic and so detrimental to someone’s health.
However, I see now based on my research that social media usage is definitely correlated with the increase in depression rates amongst young people. There are some ways that social media has been a benefit, but also it must be doing something awful if scientists believe there is a need to create a tool to predict suicide attempts based on social media activity. Since this problem is so specific, there are even new words/names for this specific type of addiction and changes in mental health.
So I think that in the end, this research has made me more aware of the fact that this is such an issue. Ignorance can cause a lot of unintentionally mistakes in this world, and taking the time to overcome my own ignorance and make myself informed about an issue will help me in my future.
Redesign Social Media
Well, my question has definitely been answered, that yes, depression from social media is without a doubt a new kind of depression entirely.
One thing that I think would help change how social media affects our mental health is to remove systems such as follower counts and likes. Comments encourage more communication between individuals, but when you could just like or follow, you no longer have to comment, which stops humans from interacting with each other. I think this will also make people feel less pressure when posting online, and less likely to engage in narcissistic behaviors such as relying on like-counts to feel validated.
(This sort of thing is already being worked on, though! See https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/02/facebook-hidden-likes/)
I think another thing that could be changed about social media overall is how the notifications work. I usually get more notifications about suggestions of things to look at rather than information about my own content. I think one would be less likely to click on the app every few minutes if we didn’t get notifications like this. I would still like to know if someone comments on something I posted, but I don’t really want to get notifications about posts from people I didn’t choose to see.
Finally, I think that social media should stop suggesting so much to its users. I choose what I want to view already, I don’t need facebook or Instagram telling me what to look at. So those AI profile versions of ourselves should be let go of. Let the people decide what content they want to see or not see.
At the end of the day, I still believe that people should be allowed to make choices on what they decide to spend their time doing, so removing social media outright would just seem counterintuitive to me. Right now, the internet is manipulative and controlling in ways that make people have clouded judgment. There are ways to stop that. But if we took away these things altogether, I think that would be sort of controlling to humanity in another way, by taking away their right to make that choice in the first place.
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