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The author of this article found that people sometimes say bad things about how you look which is often considered cyberbullying. "Bad comments can be commenting on how you look and be considered cyberbullying", (Bokath, 2). The way that this statement connects to the topic is because if bad comments on social media are forms of cyberbullying that also shows that social media makes people feel bad and causes depression and other sorts of bad feelings.

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Photo: Pexels

How has social media affected our mental health? Instagram, in particular, has affected our mental health. But how? What can we do to stop our mental health from being affected by "Click here to enter text?"

I feel like Instagram has affected our mental health in a lot of ways. Teens' mental health is being destroyed by social media as we are comparing ourselves to one another or by bad comments. Bad comments can be commenting on how you look and be considered cyberbullying. According to research published by the American Psychological Psychological Association (APA). "Studies have linked Instagram to depression, body image concerns, self-esteem issues, social anxiety, and other problems. By design, the app capitalizes on users' biological drive for social belonging-and nudges them to keep on scrolling."

Social comparison is also horrible for our mental health. People compare their lives to social media or other people. Most of the time, Instagram is usually fake, but how would you know? You would start thinking how boring or bad your life is and make really bad thoughts in your head. "Upward social comparison in particular is extremely common on Instagram," according to psychology researcher Jasmine Fardouly, Ph.D, who is quoted in the APA article, which also notes: " Users evaluate their own life alongside curated - and often edited-images of others ... That can lead to false social comparison when users contrast their appearance with idealized images."

In general, self-esteem and confidence are big things to focus on. Social media destroys them. Now, people care about likes, comments and shares. If people don't get enough likes on a post it could lead to so many problems. They could ask themselves, "Why did she get that many? Am I not pretty enough?"

This comparison and destroying of self-esteem could lead to harm. Kids today care about this for popularity, which could even lead to depression because of so many doubts or not enough likes. The same APA article also notes: "In particular, Instagram users who engage in digital status seeking (looking for popularity online) and social comparison (evaluating oneself in relation to others) tend to experience negative psychological outcomes. Such behaviors have been linked to increases in depressive symptoms, social anxiety, and body image concerns across age groups, as well as decreases in self-esteem."

What can I do to stop Instagram from affecting my mental health? You could spread positivity so you can help others going through the same thing. You could also only follow positive creators or mental health platforms. Last year, UNICEF published "Five tips to maintain your mental health while using social media" and suggests:

"Use social media for good, by sharing positive and supportive content and messages with your friends, family and classmates. ...

"Try and find positive and motivating content and creators to follow, like athletes, singers, home cooks, self-made entrepreneurs, authors, or even young people speaking up about mental health, and managing their own mental health issues- it can be any one or group that inspires you to be healthy in mind and body."

How has social media affected you and your mental health? What do you do to prevent it from negativity affecting you ? What advice or do you know how to prevent it.

Paula Ortiz, is a student at North Springs High School, agrees social media does have an impact on our mental health. She says we compare ourselves to social media, and others. We also make ourselves feel bad and bring ourselves down. But she also says social media can be used for good people; can bring you up, spread awareness and donate to mental health causes. She also thinks social media is a distraction to our mental health from the bad. She says her mental health has gotten worse from social media, and ways to prevent it are to take a break and don't make social media your main source of entertainment.

Jack Baylin is also a is a student at North Springs who thinks social media absolutely affects everyone's mental health, especially when friends post and it can cause internal and external drama, which is unnecessary. He says there's so many layers of social media that can affect your mental health, and most of the bad impact comes off as perfect bodies and looks that are edited. The best way to cope is to ignore it, block it out and live your life without comparing yourself to what you see on social media.
Ansley Bokath, 14, is a 9th grade student at North Springs High School who has social media and seen the effects.
Instagram has affected dour mental health in many ways, leading to social anxiety, depression, self-harm, and being self-critical. Honestly, if its affects your health, just delete the app, go on a walk, go outside, be with friends. People compare you to everything, people depend on popularity like likes. But to help others as well, don't post bad comments, posts, etc. Be positive!

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INSTAGRAM IS DESTROYING OUR MENTAL HEALTH - VOX ATL

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Instagram, in particular, has affected our mental health. But how? What can we do to stop our mental health from being affected by "Click here to enter text?"

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Instagram Impacts the Mental Health on Teens

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Instagram Impacts the Mental Health on Teens

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In the video it says, “Scrolling through leaves some feeling depressed and anxious.” It also mentioned that 32% of girls that felt bad about their bodies they would go to social media and then feel worse.

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This article has conducted studies that have shown that social media has increased anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and other negative effects. The article states, "multiple studies have linked high usage to increased risk of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and even suicidal thoughts",(Clifford, Negative Effects). This resource explains how just looking at a piece of metal has increased anxiety and other things like depression.

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Home >> Resources >> Articles >> The positive and negative effects of social media on young people's mental health

The positive and negative effects of social media on young people's mental health

Social media is now a fundamental part of childhood. According to Ofcom's 2021 report, 95% of children are using some form of social media by age 15. Although great for socialising and creative expression, how do platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube impact mental health?

Young people use social media for a variety of reasons. For some, social media is an excellent way to connect with others, manage social anxiety and access valuable support and reassurance. However, for others, scrolling through feeds can become a compulsive addiction, fuelling unhealthy comparisons, and exposing young people to inappropriate content.

Positive Effects

Social media platforms provide opportunities to socialise, play, and learn, and can positively impact mental health by helping young people:

Maintain social bonds and stay up to date with family and friends across the globe

Connect with new friends and groups of people who share similar interests or experiences

Access constant support and advice anonymously, providing a lifeline to young people who may struggle in silence

Develop communication skills while encouraging more open and honest discussion of thoughts and feelings

Express themselves and develop their personality.

Negative Effects

Interactive technologies are relatively new, and research into short- and long-term consequences is limited. However, multiple studies have linked high usage to increased risk of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and even suicidal thoughts.

Potential risks of social media include:

Social comparison. Fear of missing out (FOMO) is not a new term, but social media sites can exacerbate these feelings. Virtual profiles allow people to share highlights of their lives, setting unrealistic expectations that leave young people feeling insecure and dissatisfied. FOMO then impacts self-esteem, triggering anxiety and encouraging more compulsive use of social media.

Body image. Young people may compare themselves to celebrities, influencers, or people they admire, developing unhealthy obsessions with appearance that can significantly impact self-esteem.

Sleep patterns. Greater social media usage has been linked to poorer sleep quality, which is in turn linked to low self-esteem, anxiety, and depression.

Self-harm and suicidal ideation. Although social media can be great for support-seeking, certain content can have a negative influence, normalising self-harm and exposing young people to explicit images/videos. With access to online forums discussing self-harm and suicide, young people may be encouraged to engage in such behaviours with devastating consequences.

Cyberbullying. Young people may enact or fall victim to bullying behaviour online. The Office for National Statistics recently highlighted how 1 in 5 children in the UK experience some form of cyberbullying. Whether through "trolling", exclusion, or sharing embarrassing images/videos, bullying significantly increases a young person's risk of developing depression and low self-esteem, making them twice as likely to self-harm.

While social media may be exacerbating existing mental health problems rather than causing them, it is clear that tighter regulations, and education on how to use it safely is needed. If we can create a safe online environment, social media has the potential to be an effective tool for mental health communication. But who's responsibility is it to regulate young people's activity?

To find further information and support please visit:

Article date 8 November 2021

Article written by Imogen Clifford, Assistant Psychologist, Bristol CBT Clinic

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Bristol CBT Clinic - Helping children and teenagers with anxiety and low mood make positive and lasting changes

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At Bristol CBT Clinic, we provide highly specialist CBT assessment and treatment for children, teenagers and students. We are dedicated to only working with young people up to the age of 25 years and to offering CBT interventions which are evidence-based and highly effective.

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This author found a study that youth, more specifically girls that feel bad about their bodies and when they go to Instagram it makes them feel even worse. "when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse", (Contreras, 2). What this statement explains is that young teens feel bad about something and Instagram make them feel worse about that thing which eventually causes depression or other negative feelings.

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Since at least March 2020, Facebook officials have known that Instagram-the photo-sharing app owned by Facebook, Inc.-has the power to make teenagers feel worse about their bodies, according to an internal report obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

"Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse," Facebook researchers wrote in the presentation about the negative effects of Instagram, according to the Journal.

The effect may have as much to do with the mechanics of the app itself as with its audience, says Rachel Rodgers, associate professor of applied psychology at Northeastern. The highly visual nature of social media platforms favored by younger people-TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram-put a social premium on appearance, says Rodgers, who studies sociocultural influences on body image and eating concerns. At the same time, the adolescents drawn to them are still developing their sense of identity.

"It's a bit like animals whose shells are still growing to protect them; it's a really vulnerable time," she says.

But, Rodgers says, there is a way to engage with these social platforms in a more balanced, healthier way. It just takes a lot of work.

What did you make of the findings about the negative effects of Instagram obtained by The Wall Street Journal?

I can't comment on what Facebook may have collected in terms of their own data or how they went about that, but I think substantively around the question of whether or not these and other platforms are related to negative mental health impacts-particularly among young people-we know from a lot of independent research that that has been shown to be the case.

Particularly in the areas I'm most familiar with, we know there are effects on young people's feelings about their appearance, their body satisfaction, and social media platforms can increase risk for eating disorders and other mental health concerns such as depression and low self-esteem. We know that cyberbullying occurs among young people, we know that for some young people, the consequences of that can be extremely damaging. There's no doubt that there's substantial research showing that these platforms can have a negative effect on young people.

What is it about using these types of social media apps that has such an effect on mental health?

There's a conjunction between what it is about the application and what it is about the audience.

In my opinion, which is supported by data, there are a lot of things that make the apps deleterious: There's the fact that the more popular applications with young folks are highly visual. You're only consuming pictures and you're also invited to only produce pictures of yourself. Both of those things orient you towards thinking that your appearance is a really important piece of you-if you're only seeing photos of other people and only posting photos of yourself, it emphasizes that appearance is a really important part of self-worth, which we know is a risky way of considering appearance because intrinsically appearance is going to change over time.

These apps are also highly interactive-one of the points of posting is to get feedback. Obviously, you always hope that feedback is going to be positive, but every young person knows that that's not always the case, either because they themselves have gotten negative feedback or because they've witnessed someone receiving negative feedback. In a conceptualization where you are only worth what your picture is, that's a direct reflection of your worth as a person. So, that becomes very impactful.

And then there's the fact that there's a real blurring between corporate interests and individual interests.

Then, you bring those characteristics together with younger people who are developing their identity. As an older adult, there are a number of things in your life that you can achieve that can put appearance in the background or balance out a negative experience, but when you're 14, you don't have that. It's a bit like animals whose shells are still growing to protect them; it's a really vulnerable time.

How is the experience of viewing images on Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok different from consuming them in magazines?

Teens are still developing an understanding of marketing intent and the amount of affection and curation that goes into images in any kind of post, really. The level of literacy around the fact that these images are highly curated and often digitally altered is really variable. You hear people say, "Well this is a video on TikTok, so it must be real because you can't alter videos." And of course, you can filter videos just like you can filter photos. There's a disconnect around the likelihood that this was edited in some way and how "real" is it?

But there's also some difficulty in understanding that even if this post isn't explicitly selling me a product, it was placed here with a particular self-promoting intent. Nobody posts to social media in the hopes that people think they're unattractive, unpopular, someone you wouldn't want to hang out with.

There's also the added wrinkle of algorithms that can fill your feed with ads based on what they think you're interested in-how does that play a role?

If we're thinking about adolescence and the importance of norms: If you think that what you're seeing is the same as what everybody else is seeing, that peer pressure is going to make a much stronger impact on you than, say, somebody who's 25 years old.

Is there a way to engage with these apps as a younger person that will be healthier or more balanced?

I think there is, and I think there are intrinsic limitations to these apps.

Some of the difficulties that are software-related are how hard it is to tell the algorithms you don't like something. You can try to play them by overexposing them to the things you do want to see, and that will kind of automatically reduce the things you don't. But Facebook and Instagram don't have dislike functions, it's really hard to say "I don't like this, I don't want to see it."

The other thing is that they're highly visual-it's really hard to interact on Snapchat or Instagram that doesn't somehow talk about appearance because text just isn't a big part of it.

I do think that young people can interact with these in better ways and some of them really do, but when they describe that, you see how effortful it is and how deliberate it has to be and the way that it, in some ways, sort of sets them apart. You can spend a lot of time getting the algorithms to learn the type of things you're interested in and then they will show you prosocial content [content that encourages prosocial behavior, or behavior through which people benefit others] or the brands that are high on corporate responsibility or sustainability or whatever your values may be.

You can also be very deliberate about who you follow, what you follow, to try to curate your online space. You can be careful about how much time you spend on it. You can choose not to participate in the pressure to make yourself highly visible, but again this is onerous as a young person because it means asking people not to tag you, and explaining that you don't have one when people ask for your handle.

I do think it's somewhat telling that the best way to do this healthfully is just not to do it.

Do these companies have a responsibility to the young people who are using their platforms to make it easier to use them in a healthy way?

I would personally say that we all as humans have a responsibility to make the world a safe, equitable, prosocial place. I would agree that companies do, and I think that's true of all companies: It's true for clothing companies and beauty companies, all companies that profit from making people feel that their appearance is inadequate. I think it's also true of us and other users. It's a social responsibility, it's something that the people who are deriving the most benefit from should care the most about.
For media inquiries, please contact Shannon Nargi at s.nargi@northeastern.edu or 617-373-5718.

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Why does Instagram have a negative effect on teenagers' mental health?

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Since at least March 2020, Facebook officials have known that Instagram-the photo-sharing app owned by Facebook, Inc.-has the power to make teenagers feel worse about their bodies, according to an internal report obtained by The Wall Street Journal.