Oversharing Online

Hi everyone! Welcome back to my blog! Today I am going to be talking about social media and mental health.

     In this day and age, we hear a lot of the negative impacts of social media on our daily lives. As more studies are being done, we can begin to understand the correlation between social media and our mental health. I don't know if there is an ideal number of "friends" on Facebook that can improve mental health, but I think the more friends you have the happier you might be. Speaking from personal experience, when these numbers are one of the first things you see when looking at your own or someone else's social media account it is really easy to compare how many friends you have. This could either impact you positively or negatively. Your "friends," or following are almost like a competition for some. The higher your numbers are the higher you rank socially. Reflecting on my own life, this seems to be very prominent in the high school setting. If you have a smaller number of friends on Facebook but a peer has three times the friends that you do, it might be common to experience insecurity, doubts and negative feelings about yourself. Overall, I think that the media has led us to prioritize how many followers or friends we have, creating an effect of more friends leading to happiness and less friends leading to feelings of sadness. When thinking about this topic I wanted to dive into some of the research and data behind it. You can read this academic study about Facebook's negative impact on the mental health of college students here. 

Clearvuehealth.com, 2017, www.clearvuehealth.com/images/social-media-depression.003.jpg

     

     I absolutely believe that social networking sites have a responsibility to promote mental health. There is a large population that has grown up with social media and when we look at the facts and how much higher our rates of depression are because of social media, it is important to start at the root of the problem. After discussing how someone's following, or number of friends can affect mental health maybe social media platforms should make that a less visible factor of profiles. Or make an option for only the account holder to see their number. I also think they could implement adds with data and facts about mental health and ways to access counseling or help. Social media platforms should want to keep their sites fun to use but also safe.