Social media is affecting mental health

13th December 2019 Gaby Wilde 318 Views Opinion piece, social media

Over the past ten years, social media has completely taken over our lives. Obviously there are some huge advantages to social media. For example, it gives you the ability to connect with friends and family from all around the world and it’s a brilliant platform for marketing and advertising. However, social media has a lot of major disadvantages and research has shown that it can have a strong negative impact on mental health.

Image result for social media — Social media is have a detrimental effect on young people

In my opinion, people are on their phones too much nowadays and it completely disconnects you from the world. According to a recent survey the average Brit checks their phone 28 times a day. This is insane, this is time that you could be spending with loved ones or socialising rather than scrolling down your Instagram feed.

Not only does it disconnect you from the world but it can also make you compare yourself to other people who seem to have ‘better’ lives than you. This makes people feel depressed. I know when it’s a miserable day in England and I’m scrolling through my phone and I see someone who is on holiday in the sun posting braggy pictures that I feel really jealous and pretty deflated.

In my opinion the fascination with ‘celebrity culture’ has only made this worse. Kim Kardashian has a seemingly perfect life when she is always posting beautiful body pics and crazy holiday posts on Facebook but you forget that she has no privacy at all and her life of course is nowhere near as perfect as it seems. Teenagers today seem obsessed with the clothing brands and the designer jewellery that they can afford, just so they can post this to their social media for everyone to see.

In my view, the only way to resolve this is for us all to try really hard not to care, the only reason social media has such a power over us is because we have given it the power to do so. We need to stop using it to brag about holidays and money and with that everyone’s mental well-being will drastically improve.