Topic: Is Social media the real cause of teenage depression?? (Read 190 times)

We follow what we see and that affects our state of mind, as you say, "What we eat, we become."  It is also true that social media is not the cause of teenage depression, but it is a medium that can increase people's state of mind or concentration.  If someone is immersed in a sad story then it will affect his mind and if someone uses social media in a positive way then his mental state will also change in a positive direction.

I feel like it all depends on how you think about these things. If you search for things that will make you happy, you will be happy through social media, and if you are in the megatibe part, you will be depressed regardless of age, not even teenagers. Social media is a space where anyone can come and do what they want; search for what you want and move on. So you should be the one to do what will help you and be depressed; it all depends on the part you want to be or what you watch online and other things that will destroy your emotion.

Social media may partly be a cause of depression in teenagers, but all these depends on the personality of the teen.

Some teenagers use social media and get inspired positively while others use social media and end up getting depressed or misled. What is the difference between these two sets of teens? The difference is that the later choose to compare their lives to that of their friends, mates or even grown-ups they don't even even know. Making them lose their self esteem and confidence as children.

Sometimes, these teens are often exposed to cyber bullying which they do not know how to handle. A child who already has a high self esteem will be able to handle cyber bullying on his/her own but those who cannot defend themselves will get drowned in self pity.

The fact that some teenagers tend to isolate themselves while attending to social media is another cause of concern which may trigger depression in some teens who need validation from their social media friends.

I would say that social media is one of the cause and also an amplifier for teenagers depression. Teenagers of this era has been exposed to social media without much restrictions even if they have restrictions, some of them still  have hacks to get access to it.
Let's not forget that families where their parents are always in conflict is also a cause of depression because when they see their mates been loved, they will always feel bad.

One does not even need to wonder whether social media cam have a negative influence on the psyque of people, specially teenagers. If I recall correctly, there has been some studies which have reach the conclusion teens using instagram are pretty much more likely to suffer from depression and low self-esteem when compared to others who do not.
Research about the public apology Meta/Facebook had to make in the congress of the USA, since they decided to ignore the results of those studies for the sake of continuing to push mass use of Instagram, so they could continue to profit off their targeted ads.

To me, it is a very bad mistake to allow very young people to have access to social media, specially TikTok, Facebook, Telegram and Instagram.

First of all I'm not sure that depression of children is big issue nowadays. Because I haven't heard that depression rate of children would be high.
Anyway, I wouldn't relate these two things. It's more about that life today is different than it was 20 years ago. Many teenagers have just digital life. Everything is all bout things on internet. Even when you see few teenagers hanging around somewhere, it's not that they're talking to each other. They're just looking at their phones.

Social media is bad for everybody. It isn't necessarily because of the social media itself. But people use cellphones for their social media. And cellphone radiation is cancer causing, and bad for health in general.

Social media isn’t harmful to teenagers at some point because it has help in so many ways. It has sometimes promote negative experiences in our lives.

The social media was created for a purpose and I believe the creators didn’t know it will turn this worse when it it comes to the disadvantage. Like you said so many people has brought forth their ideas both negative and positive to the world of social media. Currently it all seems the negative aspect of it has surpassed the positive impact of social media. Creators in as much as they try to regulate it. It still doesn’t work because they fear that over extended the restrictions can cause many to leave the app. Going on social media everyone now has the responsibility to regulate their accounts and be impacted positively.

Well there is a lot of pressure on youngsters these days in this social media generation. They all want to be rich & famous. All these influencers flaunting wealth & opulence can make a young, impressionable person depressed I guess. Not everything online is as it seems though & a lot of these so called influencers fake wealth. People should keep a sense of reality & learn to be happy with their own lives.

Of a truth, social media can have a negative effect on someone, but it can also have a positive effect also, it mostly boils down to how the person in question goes about his or her lives.

As of the case of depression, I think that the biggest cause of depression is overthinking, yes, I mean overthinking, when you go on social media and sees the fake life most of your friends back days in school are flaunting, and you start overthinking it, at a point you will definitely falls into depression especially if things aren't going that well for you, so it all boils down to how we as individual goes about with our daily activities, and it's not limited to just teenagers, it can also have an effect on adult too.

No, it's not an amplifier, but social media is really the cause of depression.

How it doesn't make you depressed when you opened your social media, you see your friends live are more happier and colorful than you while you and them live at the same city and at the same school.

You can also see there are many younger people than you are more successful and talented, you will think you've wasted your life and scared to take an action.

Yes you have already answered the question on the topic but however in a more verbal reasoning social media is also one of the tools that can cause a problem to a teenager because from all you have explained so far if there was no social media you wouldn't have face any depression because I could remember a lady who got exposed on social media and joined a certain group she mentioned that have forgotten and after then everything about her changes and she started behaving abnormal, so actually the things inside the social media is too much for a teenager to handle, so teenagers should always be disconnected from social media.

Just like every other computer system, social media is "garbage in garbage out", your input determines your output. Many people use it for business and they make money from it, while others use it for entertainment. The reason why you were getting close to depression by social media was because you searched for sad stories. If you had inputted exciting or motivational stories your spirit would have been lifted.


Your comment reminded me of the UK catfisher Alexander McCartney who targeted targeted 3,500 children online and abused least 70 of them. Such people are the reason why some youths are depressed on social media.

The social media is just a platform that gives you the virtuality and affection of reality of life.

It serves as a mirror illustrating what are possible to happen in mankind of existence.
We are all indebted to decided on our lives, what we want and how we want it to be and then work towards actualizing it.

Literally the media is a speculative influence that only displays what human has inputted inside of it. D
So knowing the immorality messages that comes out of it is what we as human should be careful about so that we don't get manipulated out of it.
The media iro have criterias for kids and adults due to its potential influence on the audience.

This is why I think children’s feeds should be heavily curated for them. Because they are still not mature enough to take something in on the internet and move past it. They think everything they see on social media is real and therefore must be followed.

Kids take inspiration from those they see on the internet but what do they see? The internet is full of different people and if you fall on the wrong side of it, things can get dark really fast. This just doesn’t apply in depression but in terms of violence and abuse, kids often get ideas from the internet. Social media need to do better for the safety of children on their platform.

Agreed.
While these days it is not THE cause, it certainly does exacerbate any issues that is normal for most teens to go through.

it depends on how you look at it. If you constantly feed yourself with negative informations and stories from social media, it's just normal that it amplifies and might lead you to becoming depressed. What happened when you then do the opposite and watch content that amplifies the soul and gets you geared into making right decisions? Would you still become depressed? We are used to giving excuses on things we have power over and try to paint it black when that same thing can be used positively for our good.

If social media has gotten 10 persons depressed, 20 others are able to come out of thier depression because of the channels they watched on the same social media platforms. I can comfortably count out more than 30 channels that usually pops on my news feed that helps me stay away from being lazy with my life and for me, social media has done better good to me. The algorithm that suggest depressing stories to you can also suggest soul enriching stories to you if you change what you usually search for on your media handle. You just have to work on your interest and you will enjoy the good side of social media.

It's not social media that is the problem. The fact that people are using social media to search for things, simply shows the thing that is expressed near the beginning of the movie "Jesus Revolution." People, especially teenagers, are looking for God. And they don't even know it.

The failure of social media is evident in all the depressed kids out there. Many of them are committing suicide.

If you want to help them, get them to a Bible believing church, and make ways for them to be interested in the Bible. To do this, you will have to find ways to show them that the Bible actually talks about and answers their questions that the schools and science have failed to answer.

For example. The furthest we can go back in time is about 5,000 years. The writings of the scientists who suggest that the universe is billions of years old... these writings say right within themselves that it only looks like it, but that they don't/can't know for sure. But the Bible answers it all right in the first line/sentence.

Another example is Big Bang. BB simply is another name for God. Without God, there can't be any BB. Why? Because both, BB and God, are something that is not comprehensible. It is simply the beginning.

Kids know this instinctively. What they need is somebody to show them how it fits together. But most teachers and adults can't show them, because the teachers and adults are just as lost as the kids are.

I very firmly say yes it is because of social media, most teenagers today watch too much of other people's lives on social media, hear too many things they don't need to hear on social media, if you experience when your mood is bad, then you try to entertain yourself by playing social media such as short videos on YT, IG, FB, Tiktok or others you will find what you feel like validated by such content, then when you watch it longer, videos like that will continue to appear on your homepage which will make you dramatize your own feelings, and that's where depression should not occur in adolescents.

Social media is just like a tool that can't invent anything on its own, but it is conditioned-based on what the user feeds it with. Some years ago, I used to love sad and depressing stories, and anytime I went to social media, I typed 'stories that can make me cry, sad love stories, etc.' As time went on, I didn't need to type it because once I opened my account, sad stories were already there for me to read. At a point, it amplified and increased the chance of me getting depressed because what we feed our minds with later becomes our reality subconsciously.so i will say social media is an amplifier that amplifies what is inside a container.

In conclusion, social media isn't the cause of depression for teenagers; rather, it is an amplifier of what resides in such a child.