Social Media and Mental Health
Now that I have gotten your attention using a picture that is “trending” on all social media platforms, I want to discuss how exactly social media is gaming our minds and playing with our mental health by feeding us with overload of undesirable, inappropriate information.
Tomorrow is World Suicide Prevention Day and I want to discuss what has been bothering me for quite some time now. Bothering me in fact from the day I read the news about Sushant Singh Rajput’s (SSR’s) death and what followed post that. I remember someone once said “Obituaries would be a lot more interesting and would attract reader attention if they carried the reasons for the death of that particular individual, the back story.” And I see that social media or media in general is doing exactly that. Monetising and capitalising on every piece of information including death. In the past 2 months almost every client I have spoken to (across all age groups) has mentioned to me that he/she has been following the updates of SSR’s case closely and they subconsciously have started to feel the same, SUICIDAL. And this is alarming. Copy cat suicides is a dirty reality of this digital world. I wouldn’t want to get into what is the truth and what is the political conspiracy behind it, but I am definitely concerned about how social media is leaving no stone unturned in making sure they get the maximum attention from users through this story. I have always been concerned about how social media has been consistently trying to change the social fabric and the general mindset of people. The customised infinite feed, the social validation, the polarisation, the populism — the way it is manipulating people to get addicted to social media… all of it affects people’s minds to the point that a lot of times we no longer can distinguish right from wrong. Statistics show that since around 2011, the number of suicides have been rising all over the world and particularly amongst teens and pre teens the numbers have been rising exponentially and the reasons are directly linked to social media usage.
I have a lot of times lamented to my friends and family that we are digressing as a society. A couple of decades ago, our life was a lot different from what it is today after social media came into our life. We were more accommodating and empathetic as humans. We believed that everyone is entitled to live the way they want to live and hold the opinions they want to hold. We agreed to disagree and didn’t impose parameters to people’s looks, thoughts, priorities, actions etc., to belong to our group. There was no compulsion to associate with people holding identical opinions. Of course we did have our occasional arguments and fights but overall there was a culture of listening to people and respecting them for what they are. But with the advent of social media came the excessive need for social validation and with that came a lot of complicated issues of body dysmorphia, loneliness, aggression, bigotry, intolerance etc.,
The image we project on social media, the validation we seek through views, likes and comments, the increasing dependency on wanting to constantly think about what some 1000 virtual friends are thinking about us is sucking every bit of self esteem and sense of self worth away from us. Most of us no longer want to believe in our reality but what is the reality that is being projected on social media. This constant engagement and need to feel connected due to FOMO (fear of missing out) as Gen-Z would like to call it is also distracting our focus and concentration and turning us more and more into junkies who can hardly prioritise what is important for us and are running in autopilot from one push notification to another.
Very often we are unmindful of the kind of toll this attention extraction model of social media is taking on our mental health. Worse in some cases, also pushing people to have suicidal ideation. So do we pull ourselves off social media and erase all digital footprint? Probably not. But it definitely is important that we demand how the corporations that own these social media giants should be held accountable for whatever is shared on their platforms. We can demand that ethical standards be prescribed and every piece of information displayed on their page is screened before being approved for posting. We can definitely demand how “surveillance capitalism” can be kept under check and we choose to use platforms which don’t do this surveillance of our social media presence. We need to practice mindfulness when we are consuming information on social media. We need to be exactly aware of how social media is manipulating us and not treat it like a digital pacifier to cope with/ escape from the realities of our life. We need to be cognisant of the fact that we can live a far more enriching life by limiting our social media usage and particularly the consumption of information which is disturbing us emotionally, stealing away our time, making us increasingly polarised not allowing us to be empathetic listeners, keeping us away from “real” social interactions and most importantly, reducing our sense of self worth.