by Samantha Wall
The importance of acknowledging and acting to better mental health is a rising issue, especially in today’s advanced world. The reason I think poor mental health has increased over the past few years is because of social media being so easily accessible.
Mental health is like the four stages of cancer. It can easily go unnoticed until it gets to the worst stage. However, no matter what stage you advance to, the cancer was always there from the start, just maybe less noticeable.
Most people don’t realize they’re suffering from mental health issues due to habits social media has allowed us to create and over-normalize.
Social media directly affects our lives in many ways. Let’s say a single mom is scrolling through instagram alone in her room, she clicks on a friend’s profile and sees that every post her friend has is with her boyfriend, holding hands in almost every picture. She falls into the trap that this couple is “perfect” just because they have so many posts together. She especially stares at the most recent post of her grinning from ear to ear as her boyfriend proposes. The single mom begins to worry that she will never find a husband. She thinks to herself that she won’t ever be as happy as her friend. She stands up, and taking her irrational thoughts to the mirror, begins criticizing herself for not being as attractive as her friend. A chain effect like so appears in different ways to all sorts of people who are also actively on social media.
Social media is right there, staring at you the second you open your laptop or unlock your phone. It’s presence reminds you to check it as each app floods you with notifications all day long. It takes no effort to make yourself feel like crap every day, which is why mental health issues are increasing at such a fast pace.
Everyone is damaging themselves but not caring to stop it. Why? Because no one recognizes it. How can you even start to fix the problem when it’s seen as the opposite of a problem to everyone else? To make the point worse, if you aren’t on social media, you are considered out of the loop.
Of course it makes sense that most people are unable to see the issue. Social media has taken over our lives and basically owns us. We walk around acting like zombies to our phones. Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be the case. Social media only owns you if you allow it to own you.
In order to decrease poor mental health, people have to realize the leading cause. Social media wasn’t created to make people happy. The true purpose of social media traces back to financial reasons. A source of entertainment that makes a lot of money. Social media is frying our brains by altering our ways of processing and responding to information. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to delete all forms of social media, but rather learn how to play the field and know how to make smart decisions with it. Why base your value on endless snapchat stories of people you don’t know personally? The sliver of insight to someone’s life is a false perspective of reality. Wouldn’t you rather take on life with a positive, healthy mindset that allows you to live up to your full potential rather than spend it worrying about how to ‘fit in”?
