Social Media and Mental Health
Social Media and Mental Health
The first article I read was the Help Guides article called Social Media and Mental Health. This article talked about the importance of social media, how it can effect someone negatively and how social media can be a positive influence on people when not overused. What I loved about this article was that it gave great breakdowns for positive and negative uses of social media, other causes of unhealthy social media use, signs that social media is impacting your mental health, modifying social media use to improve mental health, and ways to help a child or a teen with unhealthy social media use. The reading was very interesting but it did not make me think in a new way, what I will say is that it enhanced what I already knew and gave great examples for ways to handle social media both positively and negatively. One thing that did stick out to me was this image below. The image stuck out to me because if someone was just scrolling through the article this is one thing most people would stop at and read, and I feel like of all of the points made in this article this was a great point to highlight.
The second article I read was the Wall Street Journals article Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show. This article was definitely shocking. I opted to have the article read to me which was nice but the information presented in this article was sad, a company like facebook and instagram knows they are promoting an unrealistic idea of what a woman's body "should" look like as they focus on body and lifestyle mostly and this gets viewed by young girls which ultimately ends up having them create these unrealistic vision of what a woman should look like and be like. Something also very shocking that was presented in this article was "among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed". This article definitely made me think in a new way, the information presented now has me looking at my own social media account and who I follow and what those accounts are presenting online to their audience. Something that was sparked for me was talking to students about this as a component to a possible future lesson on the importance of mental health and social media use. Below is an image from a presentation given about teens who struggle with mental health say instagram make it worse, this is truly sad and just goes to show how important it is to talk to teens and kids about mental health and how instagram is just an edited and highlighted version of their life, just a picture into it.
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