write my psychology essay

write my psychology essay

The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health: A Psychological Perspective

1. Introduction to Social Media and its Pervasiveness in Society

One of the major downsides of immersion in social media is publicized by the wise words of Aldous Huxley, “Attention, more than Truth, is a limited commodity.” The constant use of social media can interfere with daily functioning, sleep, and academic or professional productivity. Other relevant downsides will be discussed in a more detailed manner later, but, suffice to say, cyberbullying, reduced self-esteem, and privacy violations are just some of the additional problems caused by social media involvement. Negative mental health concerns are more common in the younger generations, especially for young females who feel tremendous pressure to achieve unrealistic beauty, while young men feel pressured in their sexual attractiveness and manliness. Young people of diverse sexual orientations and gender identity expressions are at an increased risk for suicidal behavior due to painful victimization online. Sexual and gender minorities feel particularly vulnerable when they notice hate speech events, are specifically targeted and experience high self-stigma. In this chapter, we aim to review these issues, as well as the possible benefits and limitations of using the most popular social media platforms concerning their psychological impact.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp have become a daily part of many people’s lives. They allow users to share photos, information, news, events, and updates with family, friends, and the public. Some of the positive aspects of using social media are maintaining connections with friends and family, making new contacts with like-minded others, receiving support, quickly finding news information, and joining groups of personal interest. Due to their popularity, the general use of social media has become an important component of contemporary society, with 3.2 billion users worldwide. However, the excessive use of these mediums may have some negative consequences, leading to concern within the public, research, and policy-making communities.

2. The Relationship Between Social Media Use and Mental Health

There are some indications that the influence of social media use on the users’ self-esteem is a function of the discrepancy between the self-relevant components on social media time and real-time. Using social media could lead to an increase in the level of subjective well-being for an individual with a high positive self-discrepancy between online and real-life time. Further, the use of social media has an impact on the individual. The self-evaluative emotions of use time are influenced by personal and situational characteristics. The social comparison events satisfy the user’s need to compare with others and thus reduce the psychological symptoms such as loneliness, depression, and anxiety, resulting from ambivalent incompleteness. Social media gives the individual a platform to participate in others’ self-representational pages and form expected impressions. The presence of others helps the individual form new self-representations resulting from the high perceived group consensus.

The relationship between social media use and psychological health has become an important topic in the research literature of psychology. The use of social media has both negative and positive effects on the social adjustment and mental health of individuals. The application of the social cognitive model and the theory of social comparison could explain the relationship between the use of social media and psychological health. The increasing number of studies on social media allows an individual to look at a customized supply of mass interpersonal events, which reduces affective loneliness and the change in the subjective feeling of social connection. Observing different social comparison events replaces the individual impression of self-representational content, and the judgment comprehension and its utilization are replaced by the subjective impression of others.

3. Psychological Mechanisms Behind Social Media’s Effects on Mental Well-being

These psychological processes are further driven by other binary characteristics of social media usage, such as its broad, inclusive reach as well as the motivations driving the same. A critical observation that needs to be made about the impact of social media on its users is the intensity of its effects on the relatively small number of users, such as the youth and the distressed, who are not users of this digital mainline drug and become, or are further snared into this fellowship of the miserable. If a silver lining had to be found in the data presented, it is that the non-users of social media who, for whatever reason, have missed the consumption of this digital Kool-Aid, continue to be, apparently, stable in their mental well-being.

It may now be clear to the astute reader that social media use looks like a two-edged sword. It not only has its benefits but also carries its hidden liabilities, users may incur without realizing it. As they may realize, these effects are grounded in basic psychological principles that social behaviour scientists have systematically studied for over 100 years. A brief disquisition of these also helps underscore the difference in the impact of these on social media use and that of face-to-face interaction. Here are some key psychological mechanisms by which the uses of social media differentially affect individuals. The pan-party psychological processes that facilitate the harmful impact of social media with respect to these is that: inherently, these platforms engage individuals for more and longer than face-to-face interactions, are not bound by the social norms that are social aids that make social encounters beneficial to individuals; these, in addition to making sick the already sick, roll out a continuously, seemingly never-ending, feast/fete that others consume with such relish as to become, themselves, sick.

4. Strategies for Promoting Positive Mental Health in the Digital Age

It has been argued that the relationship between social media and mental health problems is a symptom of wider mental health problems among young people (e.g., loneliness or body image concerns) rather than a cause per se. Thus, interventions that address young people’s well-being need to take a wider perspective and not focus on social media alone. Underpinning this perspective is that the tools for navigating digital issues are much the same as those for navigating the general business of growing up. Engaging students in thinking about risk and how to mitigate it, while promoting play and relaxation, a sense of purpose and achievement, and a supportive environment, are core components of resilience.

Given the increasing influence of social platforms on young people’s lives, in the final part of this chapter, we turn our attention to the question of what can be learned from psychological research on how to promote positive mental health in the digital age. PSHE guidance is clear that schools need to cover digital literacy and teach pupils how to stay safe online, but the guidance is less clear on how to promote positive mental health when it comes to the use of social media by young people.