Instagram Might Actually Be Making You Depressed
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