For Better or Worse: How Social Media Shapes Our Mental Health

I recently read a very interesting book, “Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Mental Illness” by Dr. Lucy Foulkes. The book focuses on some of the misunderstandings about the prevalence of mental health conditions, driven in part by the lack of knowledge of statistics by the general public and by sensationalism by the news media in the pursuit of
“eyeballs.” The book is worth reading, and it fits nicely with a presentation that I have been giving at conferences lately on the risks of self-diagnosis of mental health conditions.

In this blog, though, I want to narrow my comments to the book’s treatment of how social media is sometimes believed to encourage mental health conditions, such as anxiety, depression, ADHD, or Autism Spectrum Disorder. Here are some of its key cautionary points:

• Be careful of estimates of mental illness based on questionnaires, videos, or even interviews carried out by non-psychologists or psychiatrists. They invariably confuse symptoms with diagnoses. The same words can mean different things to different people

• Mental health conditions are on a continuum. Many people feel down but are not clinically depressed, and even if they meet a depression diagnosis, there are degrees of severity

• Remember that the goal posts for mental health conditions (DSM diagnostic criteria) move a bit every few years as we gather more info, so comparisons across years are problematic

• The better controlled studies suggest that the relationship between use of “social media” and mental health conditions is very weak, at best

• “Social media” as an umbrella term is too vague to be a useful construct. It means different things to different people. Are they reading the New York Times? Posting cat videos? Editing selfies endlessly? Selling home made products? Many uses of social media have no relationship to mental health

• When there appears to be a relationship, bear in mind that this is always
correlational: Which came first, the neuroticism or the use of social media?

• By focusing on the negative, we may be missing the other half of the story, that for some, social media might be good for mental health, e.g., by leading people to seek appropriate treatment or community support

• Don’t forget the broader context. Generation Z, which has reported more mental health conditions than older generations, grew up in a more stress-filled environment, including the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, the subsequent recession, and the rise of global populism. Older generations grew up in different and sometimes more affluent times: so, it’s not just the phones

• Bottom line: Part of the reason why rates of mental illness may seem to be rising could be that at a societal and cultural level, we are more readily interpreting our experiences as such. “Social media” may simply provide a vehicle for socializing this change in interpretation

What does all this mean for PRIMA members? As with many other tools, social media is neither good nor bad. It can be a vehicle for good, e.g., by leading to greater awareness of mental health stigma and by pointing people to sources of information, support, and treatment. It can also be misused to provide erroneous self-diagnoses and lead people to seek “treatment” that they don’t need or that could make them worse. Or it could just be a vehicle for posting cat videos!