It’s time for us to start worrying about social media.

As a society, social media is making us more depressed and anxious than ever. Adolescents’ mental health is at what some would call a global all time low. Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011, psychologist Jean M. Twenge said in a report for The Atlantic. In addition, The American College Health Association found in its annual survey that the percentage of undergraduates reporting “overwhelming anxiety” increased from 50 percent in 2011 to 62 percent in 2016.

It can be easy to write these statistics off as side effects of a changing society or representations of the sensitivity of the millennial generation, but the timing of such radical changes proves the findings are not just mere coincidence.

Twenge, who invented the term “iGen” for adolescents born between 1995 and 2012 who never grew up without immediate access to technology, sees one direct cause of the rising rate of mental illness: social media. The year 2012 is vital in reference to this theory, as it was when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Thus, it’s no surprise statistics show drastic rising rates of adolescent anxiety, depression and suicide beginning after 2012.

The correlation between social media and mental health might not be an earth-shattering finding for some, but I think these trends should be cause for an extensive discussion about society’s social media use and how to move forward. To do so, we first have to examine why social media has the ability to induce such negative effects on adolescents’ mental health.

The most common rationale is because social media leads us to spread ourselves too thin by being active on multiple social networking platforms, said mass communication professor and social media expert Lance Porter.

It’s well documented that multitasking has negative effects on mental health. In the world of social media, though, multitasking means balancing different profiles on many social media accounts. Unfortunately, it’s more common than not to be active on more than one social media network; The Pew Research Center found in 2016 that more than half of the online population uses more than one social media platform.

“The more platforms that people use, the more there’s a direct relationship with their levels of depression and mental illness,” Porter said.

In my own experience, using multiple social media platforms a day increases the amount of time I spend looking at a screen and not interacting with the outside world. Often, when I check one social media platform, I instinctively check one or two others subsequently. This creates an undesirable effect on my psyche, making me feel like an outsider looking in, not like I’m a part of a community as intended.

Porter, who is also the director of the Social Media Analysis and Creation Lab on campus, believes the reason why we tend to stretch ourselves across different social networks is because of the dopamine hit we get every time we change platforms, look at something new or check our notifications, he said. 

This begins to have a negative effect on us as we worry about privacy and the accessibility of our information. The more platforms you’re on, the less control of your information you retain and the greater the concern is for how you’re perceived in the digital realm, Porter said.

Having to constantly worry about the image you project on each different platform is tiring and anxiety-inducing. This is especially true when you take into consideration the fact that different platforms are used for different purposes. Crafting a perfect image on Instagram is one thing; your audience is mostly friends and fans. But crafting a perfect image on Facebook is an entirely different process, as your family members and other adults are the main audience.

Research from an article in the scientific journal “Computers in Human Behavior” supported Porter’s findings that juggling several platforms as opposed to one or two is linked to a higher risk of depression and anxiety. They also found that those who used more than seven platforms had more than triple the risk for anxiety and depressive symptoms than those who used just one or two.

Porter expresses concern over this phenomenon, especially taking into consideration the idea that young people’s brains and social skills are still developing.

By playing up to the vulnerability and weaknesses of young adults who are easily influenced, social media platforms are able to garner more engagement. Inherently, social media relies on manipulation and exploitation to take advantage of their typically adolescent audience.

Another important phenomenon Porter and other researchers mention is the well-established cliché of F.O.M.O., or “fear of missing out.” 

Since 1975, The National Institute on Drug Abuse has asked 12th graders a variety of questions about their behaviors, values and attitudes. Since 1991, it has asked eighth and 10th graders the same questions. Within the last few years, the institute has found an alarming trend: teens who spend more time than average on some kind of screen are more likely to be unhappy.

Among these findings, it was also discovered that in addition to an increase in loneliness, nowadays teens feel left out more than ever. In 2015, there was a 48 percent increase in girls reporting feeling often felt left out compared to 2010 and a 27 percent gain for boys.

If you put some thought into this, this seems to make sense. Think about the last concert you went to. Think about how many people had their phones out the whole time, recording videos for Snapchat rather than taking in the moment. Think about how those people who may not have been invited to that concert may feel. Thus, fear of missing out is born.

As part of his research, Porter has interviewed two young people a week for the last few years and has seen the fear of missing out play out directly. He said many people are unaware they are even affected by F.O.M.O.; it’s just become a normal response to social media.

Other teens discuss how seeing braggadocios pictures of vacations and big events in other people’s lives negatively affect their own views of themselves, thus playing into Leon Festinger’s social comparison theory, which states that we determine our own social and personal worth based on how we stack up against others. Social media is making this theory especially relevant today, and it’s worth it to consider the negative effects this can have on mental health.

The Royal Society For Public Health in collaboration with the Young Health Movement says that Instagram in particular — because of its reputation as a perfectly curated life highlight reel — sets unrealistic expectations and creates feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem. These feelings end up manifesting themselves into depression and anxiety, increasing the stressors experienced by adolescents.

What’s interesting, though, is that very rarely do the pictures we post on Instagram accurately represent our lives or us. We want our Instagrams to be a carefully manicured selection of the best parts of our lives, ignoring any of the struggles we may have to go through on a day-to-day basis. We project ourselves as the person we want people to think we are rather than the person we actually are.

Thus, comparing ourselves to others who we think have better lives than us gives us a false sense of reality.

“It all plays into this whole idea of authenticity and how you present your authentic self when you’re constantly thinking you’re being judged by other people,” Porter said.

If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering what we can do with all this information. It’s not enough just to acknowledge that social media can lead to anxiety and depression, but we have to implement new rules and make changes to our collective consciousness that help protect young people from being subjected to the negativity social media can inflict.

With the overwhelming research, doctors should start to acknowledge social media as a serious cause for depression and anxiety in adolescents and ask their patients with documented anxiety or depression about their social media use. This could lead to a more thoughtful analysis of our use and how it affects our mental health. It could also lead to doctors implementing social media restrictions on depressed and anxious patients, a solution I believe would work as a type of therapy.

In addition, The Royal Society For Public Health recommends for high schools and universities to teach classes about responsible and healthy social media use. If we learn from a young age how to properly use social media, then we may not see such alarming results.

Porter, for one, has a simple but effective solution: being more thoughtful with our social media use. Individually, we have to become more aware with how we use technology and limit our use to only when we want to use it. Porter suggests asking yourself before logging into Facebook or Twitter, “Should I really be using this right now? Is it the best time for me to use this?”

Porter also encourages adolescents to limit the time spent on social media, as it distracts from the important aspects of life, specifically face-to-face conversation.
Building up our conversation skills should be extremely important to adolescents as we begin to enter the professional world; having a good social media profile can only get us so far.

“The give and take of conversation is important to us as humans,” Porter said. “In some ways, the platforms that exist right now may damage that ability.”

There’s something about conversing, laughing and relating to another human that cannot be recreated, not even digitally. It increases our self-confidence and self-worth, and it reinforces the person that we are, something we are desperate for on social media but seldom get.

It’s tempting to imagine an idealistic world without social media at all, but as we move forward that’s not likely to ever happen. Social media may not be going anywhere anytime soon, but we can work together to make adolescents’ lives better by continuing this discussion and implementing policy about responsible use.

By using social media mindfully, we can regain the control it’s taken from us.

Bobby Crane is a guest columnist who works as an entertainment reporter for The Daily Reveille.