Jan. 30 (UPI) — Despite growing research to the contrary, a new study suggests that there is no link between social media use and depression — instead pegging potential mental health issues to those already experienced by users.
A study of college and adolescents, published Tuesday in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, showed that social media does not bring about a risk of depression. However, the study did find that adolescent girls who already had symptoms of depression were more likely to spend extended time on social media.
“This finding contrasts with the idea that people who use a lot of social media become more depressed over time,” Taylor Heffer, a researcher at Brock University and study lead author, said in a news release. “Instead, adolescent girls who are feeling down may turn to social media to try and make themselves feel better.”
Numerous recent studies have claimed to show that the more time people spent using social media, the more likely they were to be depressed.
Some have even reported that social media can lead to more loneliness.
But researchers who conducted this current study disagree. They say people have different sensibilities and overall states of well-being, and those play a bigger role in predicting whether someone will display depressive symptoms after using social media.
The conclusion is based on the study’s authors conducting annual interviews with 594 adolescents in 6th, 7th and 8th grade in Ontario, Canada, for two years, as well as interviewing 1,132 college students annually for six years.
“You have to follow the same people over time in order to draw the conclusion that social media use predicts greater depressive symptoms,” Heffer said. “By using two large longitudinal samples, we were able to empirically test that assumption.”
Now the researchers will go out and continue to study the interaction between social media and mental health.
“There may be different groups of people who use social media for different reasons,” Heffer explains. “For example, there may be a group of people who use social media to make social comparisons or turn to it when they are feeling down, while another group of people may use it for more positive reasons, such as keeping in contact with friends.”