Unlike the popular belief, daily social media use does not cause depressive symptoms among adolescents. According to a study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, there is no compelling evidence to suggest that social media use meaningfully increases adolescents’ risk of depressive symptoms.
The study, done by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health researchers, is based on the survey data collected by Monitoring the Future.
Monitoring the Future is an ongoing study which is examining the behavioral patterns of Americans from adolescence through adulthood.
Analyzing the data of more than 70,000 Americans studying in 8th and 10th grade students between 2009 to 2017, the researchers found that daily social media use was not associated with depressive symptoms among majority of students.
The researchers found that most of the adolescents were suffering from mental health issues even before they turned to social media.
Researchers assessed depressive symptoms to establish underlying depression risk, which they controlled for in their analysis to understand how daily social media use might contribute to depression.
However, among girls who had the lowest risk for depressive symptoms, daily social media use was weakly associated with symptoms, though due to low risk, the overall prevalence of symptoms in that group was small. Among boys, daily social media use was not linked to increased depressive symptoms, and some evidence suggested that daily social media use may actually be protective against depression.
“Daily social media use does not capture the diverse ways in which adolescents use social media, which may be both positive and negative depending on the social context,” says senior author Katherine Keyes, Ph.D., associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School. “Future research could explore the specific behaviors and experiences of young people using social media, as well as more frequent engagement with the various platforms.”
Background
- Based on several news reports, not backed by any medical evidences, people were talking about social media and smartphone’s effect on mental health of adolescents.
- Of late, there has been an unprecedented increase in adolescent depression.
- Depressive symptoms are found to be most severe among girls.
- Many people think that since youngsters are increasingly isolated from face-to-face interaction, they are more prone to depressive symptoms, as they have exposed themselves to cyber-bullying and other kinds of negative experiences of online world.
- Many experts think that social media has a role in lower self-esteem among adolescents