Study Says, Heavy Social Media Use Harms Teens Mental Health
As per the study published in the Journal “The Lancet”, the
excessive use of social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook etc. may lead
to the psychological issues that too especially among teen girls. The evidences from the research suggests that
social media use is associated with mental health in young people.
For this research, the team took interview of around 10,904
young age students of England. In the interview they were asked to tell about
the number of times and average hours they check their social media accounts
during the day. After three years of the interview, the same teens that were
involved previously were asked to evaluate their level of happiness, how
anxious they feel and their satisfaction towards life. Multivariate regression
and path models were used to examine associations between social media use and
depressive symptoms.
The average age of participants was 14.3 years. Among all
the participants, girls reported more hours of social media use than did boys. Over
2/5th of girls used social media for 3 or more hours per day
compared with 1/5th of boys. Girls were even more likely to report
fewer hours of sleep compared with boys and to report experiencing disrupted
sleep often. Apart from this, on average girls had higher depressive symptoms
scores compared with boys. In short, the negative impact of social media use on
the mental health is significantly smaller.
“Our results suggests that social media itself doesn’t cause
harm, but that frequent use may disrupt activities that have a positive impact
on mental health such as sleeping and exercising, increasing exposure of young
people to harmful content, particularly the negative experience of
cyberbullying”, explained Russell Viner, co-author of the paper.
The findings of the research highlights the potential
pitfalls of lengthy social media use for young people’s mental health. Findings
are highly relevant for the development of guidelines for the safe use of
social media and calls on industry to more tightly regulate hours of social
media.
Russell Viner further added in his statement that, “the
study does not mean that social media is inherently evil. In fact social media
can have positive impact on teenagers, it’s just that you have balance all the
important things too with social media activities”.
Study Says, Heavy Social Media Use Harms Teens Mental Health
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August 20, 2019
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