hmm, i do wonder which causes which. Depression makes you prone to addictions as you seek anything to give you the happy chemicals. But constant social media exposure is rather harmful when you just take it all in, and that can cause depression Especially if you don’t block keywords for war coverages and politics.
i stand firm in my opinion that human brains are straight up not designed to take in a constant stream of bad news from around the world, which sucks because we are designed to focus on negatives for our survival. Memories of accidents and deaths take priority over nice memories so that we can avoid dangers better. from evolution’s point of view you being happy is an afterthought, you just need to live long enough to fuck. and across history it worked! we never had to distinguish between dangers nearby and dangers so far away it literally does not matter for you, as all news were brought by foot or with an otherwise huge time delay - they were either nearby or already history, and only one or two at a time. well, never… until today, and our neuroplasticity doesn’t seem to be enough to counter this, and evolution doesn’t work fast enough to fix this
Could also be a vicious cycle where if you trip and fall once both will create a negative synergy where you try to drown your sorrows in addictive doomscrolling, which only makes you worse
I’m a little disappointed that they looked at each of social media, phone use and video game use independently as part of the study and didn’t seem to consider any covariance. If you’re looking for which things are really associated, seems like it’d be helpful to see where they overlap.
Oh gee I wonder why depressed kids are increasingly online where they are more free to express themselves, in a society where mental health problems are very stigmatized and confiding in someone that you want to kill yourself can get you imprisoned.
Also, related post on the general concept of internet addiction and
gamblingsocial media addiction.going to bat for the concept of internet addiction as someone under 80 is spectacularly funny
damn people are spending a lot of time on the combination newspaper/public square/vast searchable library of incomprehensible amounts of information/storefront/private communications/some people’s actual job technology. presumably there is some nefarious Scary Pathological Aspect to this,
Imagine if you called gambling addiction “addiction to going outside” and doomed the discourse to constantly bounce between “ok SOME outside activities are bad, you need to have a good relationship with how you interact” and “theres nothing wrong with going outside dumbass”
“gambling addiction” is an invention of the gambling industry leveraged to pathologise the human misery inflicted on purpose as part of their business model and divert discussions of that misery and suffering away from regulatory and political interventions that could prevent that harm and towards biomedicalized management of those experiencing that (again–foreseeable, inevitable, industry-working-as-intended) harm
