“Teenagers use social media too much. Social media is harmful for your health.” These are common phrases that people say all the time, especially parents. However, not many people know that social media actually does help mental health. According to a study from Sage Journals, older people around 65 years old benefits socially from the effects of social media use, but that is contrasted by the negative effects of social media on teenagers.

As Dr. William Pirl of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston said, depression symptoms are helped by social support. Older people tend to stay at home more due to declines in physical mobility and chronic diseases, which leads to loneliness and depression from not having any social interaction. In fact, older people progressively get worse at simple thought processes, attention, and fluid intelligence. According to Sage Journals, social isolation can lead to worse health, especially in people of later stages in life. This is why when people progress older, their mental health gets worse, for example memory loss, because of less socialization. However, social media can help prevent degraded mental health and loneliness by letting older people interact with others online. For example, if an older person has chronic pain or a health issue that keeps them at home, then they are at risk of depression from being isolated from interacting with relatives or friends. However, social media allows isolated people to still be able to connect with others, and it can improve physical and depression symptoms.  According to a study from Shannon Ang, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and his coauthor, among people with pain, the rate of depression was lower with social media use. Social media helps older people’s health  by reducing loneliness and depression symptoms, but it is very different for teenagers.

Teenagers using social media have very contrasting effects than older people using social media. According to a survey conducted by the Royal Society for Public Health, 14-24 year olds in UK stated that Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat leads to increased feelings of depression, loneliness, and self-consciousness. Scrolling through social media pressures teenagers to be better than others, and it leads to low self-esteem. This makes teenagers want to make themselves higher and better than others, and they do this by bullying others to make themselves feel good for having others feel miserable instead of themselves. Social media definitely has a negative effect on teenagers, from anxiety, to self-consciousness, and even younger teenagers are starting to use social media more frequently.

Social media is so integrated into teenagers’ lives, and they’re become more dependent on screens. Even younger kids today are becoming more used to looking at a technological device. Teens that are so used to texting on a screen are not used to real-time social interaction. Talking to people through a communication device without seeing or hearing the other person prevents the communicators from fully understanding the receiver’s feelings. Socializing in real-life interactions gives us cues as to how the person is feeling or thinking based on their expression when something is said to them. Coming back to the topic of bullying, this is why cyberbullying has become much more common nowadays. Communicating on a screen lets communicators have more time to think what to say, and also have their guard up. They won’t see the reaction of the message’s receiver, so it is easier to say cruel things to people not face to face. Cyberbullying is one of the ways that social media hurts teenagers by causing severe mental issues to teenagers.  As a mom of a cyberbullied teenager stated, “The event [of her son being cyberbullied] was so traumatic it caused my son to have an acute psychotic break and to be hospitalized in an adolescent psychiatric ward for almost a month. He is changed forever and will never be the same mentally.” Cyberbullying is very harmful for teenagers, and it can have a life changing effect. The frequent use of social media is causing teenagers to be glued to their phones, and it is causing depression and low self-esteem.

Now, then, is social media good or bad? This is a debatable topic because it is beneficial and can prevent memory loss; however, it is very harmful to adolescents. Is this destructive but healing tool more helpful or more harmful? Perhaps, it is more the question of how people can use it for good. Social media could be a very resourceful tool as long as users know how to use it for good reasons (Rendler-Kaplan).