An analysis of data from a longitudinal study of child development in Canada showed that girls who spent more hours on the internet at 13 years of age tended to have higher depressive symptoms at age 15. In the same way, girls’ internet usage at age 15 was associated with more depressive symptoms at 17. These associations were absent in boys. The study was published in Psychological Medicine. ...
Disagree. There’s good reasons to suspect it’s causative. There’s a facebook study showing instagram is absolutely toxic for teenage self esteem that was leaked (definitely wasn’t meant to go public), and I’ve seen headlines of several academic studies indicating social media contributes to mental health issues in places like /r/science (I’ve not read them because not very interested).
Intuitively social media tipping pre-disposed people into depression seems awfully plausible from what I’ve seen
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620976
But do the studies you didn’t read make an effort to demonstrate people in similar situations get depressed after using social media at higher levels or did they simply say that heavy internet use is associated with depression?
It’s a huge difference because isolating and distracting oneself is exactly what depressed people do, time travel to the 90s and go to a library you’ll see plenty of depressed people getting their next stack of books - I never heard anyone tell me that I’m depressed BECAUSE I read a lot, probably because reading is seen as an established and good hobby where as social media is the big social poison of the day according to the older generation operating on the tradition of hating anything that’s new or different.
The problem is ‘social media bad’ gets clicks while ‘social media used by depressed people to disassociate’ doesn’t so of course the headline is always going to say the former, likewise sites like Reddit are always going to upvote those stories because everyone comes to the table expecting and wanting it to be true - this creates an environment where ‘everyone knows’ and tidbits of stories that have been exaggerate become the bedrock of their opinion, this then gets built on by ever more headlines that may or may not represent the article which may or may not represent the study which may or may not have a methodology capable of answering those questions…
(And yes I know it really feels like new thing is bad, I can’t really think of a single example of a new thing being popular with the youth that older generations haven’t said is destroying their brains, ruining the world and causing the fall of civilization. Video games, television, recreational use of anything besides alcohol, heck people are still crying about them updating math and gay people being allowed to exist.)