2024 Carl C. Bell Memorial Awards

How has social media impacted your mental health and/or the mental health of your social networks, family, schools, and/or communities?

As a child, I was limited on my social media usage and had no motivation to use it as much as my peers. After a while, I grew ashamed that I didn’t know as many people as my friends. I added people I never communicated with, feeling as though I had to show off my views and likes to my friends to be accepted. However, I quickly stopped caring and removed those people from my social media accounts. During quarantine, I spent much more time off my phone and discovered my interests. I was much happier without constantly checking my social media accounts to see who liked my photo or which of my friends unfollowed me. Once returning in person, I met new people and added them to my social accounts, which eventually affected my mental health. 

I grew confident to finally post photos of myself online and installed different apps to share my life and thoughts with friends. For a while, it had been fun and unproblematic, since social media can be beneficial in finding people to safely communicate with and expressing ourselves (Trueman). In 2022, my mental health began to suffer, and I noticed my screen time took up over half of my days on social apps. The apps themselves had not been the issue, but it became unhealthy for me to scroll on my phone for hours, viewing sad news from around the world or drama from my classmates (Brown)

I began to lose my appetite and lost over 20 pounds, cried everyday for months, and showed multiple signs of depression that possibly derived from my excessive use of social media as the National Library of Medicine suggests (Karim). Instead of being productive as I had done during quarantine, I always wondered what everyone else was doing and compared it to my own life, making assumptions that they were happier based on their social media pages. It took me a while to realize that most of my peers were also struggling from overusing social media, which affected our relationships and emotions toward one another..

Since taking psychology for two years in the International Baccalaureate Program and becoming certified in Teen Mental Health First Aid, I have become more aware of how the use of social media impacts me and my peers. In our class, we put away our phones to promote interactions with one another and discussed different solutions to preventing mental health problems that can be contributed from social media, such as anxiety and depression. Having experienced both, I learned strategies to improve my mental health and make suggestions to my classmates that struggled as well. An experiment that stands out to me from this course is taking a break from a social media app of our choice, in which I selected Instagram since sources suggest that it can be a major cause of the symptoms I struggled with (Jurnet). After a week off the app, I felt less stressed and managed to continue for an entire month of a break. 

I deleted other social media apps until I could improve my mental health, using summer breaks to step away from my phone to hang out with family and friends or pick up a new hobby. It was a difficult process removing social media from my daily routine, but I feel a lot better and have accomplished more since doing so. Although it is fine to have social media and check my account here and there, I’d much rather prefer using those hours to work toward the career I want and maintain good mental health.

References Brown, M. (2022, March 7). Social Media and Depression: What the Research Says. Psych Central. Jurnet, I. A. (2021, June 2). The Effects of Instagram on Mental Health. Relax VR. Karim, F. (2020, June 15). Social Media Use and Its Connection to Mental Health: A Systematic Review. NCBI. Trueman, T. (n.d.). Social Media and Mental Health: Social Media Addiction. HelpGuide.org.