Instagram Might Actually Be Making You Depressed

June 03, 2017 0 Comments A+ a-

 

 
If my Instagram feed is any indication, while I’m chained to my laptop working and/or getting spit up upon by my baby, the rest of the world is either (a) drinking blood orange margaritas at sunset in the Maldives, or (b) pulling off all the crop tops with perfect summer abs. It’s enough to give anyone a complex—and, according to a new British study, Instagram might actually be doing just that.
A new report by the UK’s Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) and the Young Health Movement surveyed nearly 1,500 people ages 14 to 24 about how social networking sites and apps impact their mental health, including anxiety, depression, self-identity, and body image, and found that Instagram has the “most detrimental” effect on young people (followed by Snapchat and Facebook). Instagram’s signature photo-filtering feature is one of the culprits, with young women in particular saying it causes them to see everyone else through rose-colored (or Valencia-filtered) glasses and to feel bad about their own lives and bodies as a result, negatively influencing their body image and sleep patterns, and, of course, fueling a pervasive sense of FOMO.

Or, as Matt Keracher of the RSPH told CNN, Insta invites its young, impressionable users to “compare themselves against unrealistic, largely curated, filtered, and Photoshopped versions of reality.”
Cycling through Instagram for hours every day certainly doesn’t help, as the study also found that young people who spend more than two hours per day on social media sites report more mental health issues. “Platforms that are supposed to help young people connect with each other may actually be fueling a mental health crisis,” says the report.

To combat social media addiction, the RSPH is recommending pop-up “heavy usage” warnings to alert people that they’ve been on social media for too long. Shaming the Insta- and Snapchat-obsessed youth into taking a break from their phones might sound drastic, but it could be for their own good. Bring on the “Slowly step away from Instagram Stories and go read a book” alert