Out of pure curiosity, I created an Instagram poll asking rather or not Social Media, had an effect on students mental health. The results showed me that out of 59 votes, 42 answered yes. Twenty three of the 42 were young women, meaning that the poll wasn’t gender selective.

The next morning, I had read a post on Facebook, a girl named Deja Samad, a 16 year old junior at South High saying she needed a break from social media, because it was deepening her own insecurity. I decided to message and her and ask why she felt this way, and I read, “A lot, honestly. Seeing girls who have it better than I do makes me wish I was them. Seeing girls with a better body and seeing all the boys run toward them and pushing away the decent looking girls like me makes me feel like I’m not good enough. Seeing how everyone shames girls who are bigger or smaller than what they consider to be normal. Seeing how everyone thinks they need to have flawless skin to be beautiful, makes me think that I’m not beautiful because my skin is far from flawless.- To me, social media is just a big platform to shame women who aren’t flawless.” She said all of this very passionately, and very true, but there was a common word in close to every problem she stated- they all have to deal with female insecurity. I decided to ask one of the boys I know, a 17 year old at East High, to talk about why he thinks social media is effecting his mental health, just to see if his comments would sound a little different. – “Well, Social Media is tricky; I have a love hate relationship with it. It’s like an abusive relationship, on both ends I would say. You can message anyone whenever, get all the twitter beef, and this can lead to overusing social media, becoming addicted to it, which I’m sure all of our generation can agree is a problem. Even though we use social media, in a way, I think it uses us. It can really consume you. It’s how I found out I was being cheated on, and you know that kinda sucked, but at least I had that access. Without it, I wouldn’t have even found out by now probably. But also if I didn’t have social media I wouldn’t see all the petty indirect posts about me, and I wouldn’t make them back. I wouldn’t look through peoples twitter feeds everyday it seems, and I wouldn’t have to feel so unsteady to ask for peoples passwords for reassurance that they’re being, you know, real with me? Also, I feel like social media makes it harder to get over breakups. Imagine seeing your ex all the time online, but having too much pride to block them, you know?”

So I’m seeing that social media can effect people in various ways. We have internet scams, cyber-bullying, privacy concerns (if you watched You on Netflix, you know what I’m talking about on this one). There’s also cases of intense paranoia/anxiety, low self confidence, etc. LaNita Smith, North High’s  AP Psychology and Sociology teacher has an entire unit she teaches about how social media effects mental health. Even the newest psychological disorders revolve around social media and technology itself. Together, she and I talked about how the number of likes we get start to determine self worth; people start monitoring how much likes their pictures get, and then they upload a new picture that happens to get 30 likes less than last one, so now you automatically are 30 likes less attractive, kinda thing. We talked about how our generation as a whole, starts getting overly comfortable with talking through a screen, that when it comes to face to face conversations they become mute, leading them to social isolation and in some cases depression because of this. It could also lead them into being extra bold through a screen, saying negative things or being overly opinionated, that they just wouldn’t have the guts to say in real life. We also talked a bit about privacy concerns, “your private life becomes public-” this can lead into intense paranoia, the feeling of being watched, it can lead into the inability of gaining a job, and lurking on your exes finsta six months after you breakup.

Not only is their an increase of drama, anxiety, depression, and paranoia, lack of self security, self confidence, and overall worth, but you can also get extremely addicted to social media and it has the power to consume the majority of your thoughts, control over subconscious, well being, and overall out look on your own life, but hey, there’s cute kitten videos.