Is Facebook causing depression?
Facebook and other social media platforms are under attack lately, charged with causing a good sort of harm to individualities and societies. Among the fees is that spending time on social media can cause depression. A study published in November within the journal JAMA Open Networks attempted to seem at this question more nearly and has garnered widespread attention from behavioural health experts and therefore the media.
The paper’s lead author is Roy Perlis, a psychiatrist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University in Boston and is titled “ Association between social media use and self-reported symptoms of depression in united states of America grown-ups.” The authors note that several studies have suggested this association between social media and depression, but the utmost of them are cross-sectional or involve only a little number of participants, making it insolvable to draw any cause-and-effect conclusion.
In the Perlis et al. study, further, than five thousand people with a mean age of 55.8 years and who had veritably low scores at baseline on the nine-item Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), indicating that they weren’t depressed, were surveyed roughly monthly between May 2020 and should 2021, with measures of social media use and repeat PHQ-9 at monthly. The investigators found that about nine per cent of the participants had a five-point or further worsening of their scores on the PHQ-9, indicating that they had come significantly depressed over time. Those that had worsening depression also had the foremost use of three social media platforms, Snapchat, Facebook, and Tik Tok. For Facebook, participants with worsening depression scores had a few forty per cent increased use of the social media platform compared to those participants without worsening depression scores. Controlling for measures of social contact and social support did not alter these findings, suggesting that social media use substituting for real-life social contact was not the explanation for these findings.
Does It Show Causation?
There are numerous strengths to the present study, including the veritably large sample size, the utilization of a well-validated instrument to live depression, and therefore the longitudinal design. These were all people that were not depressed at study initiation, therefore the investigators were suitable to trace the connection between social media use and therefore the evolution of depression. The question becomes, also, can we are saying that this study suggests that watching social media platforms like Facebook can cause depression?
Some headlines on websites appeared to hint that this could be the case. “ Social Media Use Tied to Self- Reported Depressive Symptoms,” read one. “ Social media use linked to depression in grown-ups,” read another. While neither of those using the word “ cause” in its headline, the impression one gets from words like “ tied to” and “ linked to” might easily be misinterpreted to mean that an unproductive relationship had been demonstrated.
Dr Perlis and co-authors note within the paper that “Especially, social media use may simply be a marker of underpinning vulnerability to depression.” That is, indeed though they did not score within the depressed range on the PHQ-9 at baseline, it is still possible that those people that went on to develop worsening depression scores nonetheless had a vulnerability or affection to depression that both drives the illness and drives one to spend further time on Facebook and other social media platforms. Because the authors themselves means, the study did not control for countless confounding factors that would be the explanation for this association between depression and social media use (e.g. prior history of depression; current life stress; reasons for getting to social media platforms) and thus causality can not be established by this study.
How Would We Establish Causality?
Yet the findings are troubling because they leave open the likelihood that a method to elucidate them is that spending time on social media may be a causative factor for depression. Is it possible that somebody who would not else become depressed do so because they spend an excessive quantity of your time on Facebook, Snapchat, or Tik Tok? What quite a study could answer the causality question also?
Generally, our default study design to answer causality questions is that the randomized trial, during which a gaggle of individuals is randomized to different conditions. In studies to check whether a replacement medicine is effective, for illustration, we might randomize a gaggle of individuals who have a specific health condition to either receive the experimental drug or a placebo. Because nothing else is different between the two groups except whether or not they have received a drug or placebo, the idea is fairly made that we have controlled for other potentially confounding factors and isolated truth effects of the drug ( belongings are not that straightforward, but that is for an additional commentary).
Could we do this with social media use? The essential design would need to be a commodity like starting with an outsized group of individuals without depression at baseline and randomizing them to different levels of social media use. We might also follow them over time, assuming that by the randomization process we have controlled for all possible confounding factors apart from how important social media is viewed. Also, we would see if people in high social media utilization groups were more likely to develop the depressive disorder than people in low utilization groups.
It is easy to ascertain why doing such a study would be challenging. First of all, it might be costly, requiring that either the social media companies buy it, which might raise problems with conflict of interest and bias, or that external finances from a foundation or federal funder be acquired. It is unclear how important the appetite there would be for doing this.
Next, it might be hard to retain such a bunch of individuals because participants would need to comply with accepting the position of social media use to which they were assigned. An individual who spent little time on Facebook, as an example, could be randomized to a bunch that has got to view it at a high position while someone who is employed to viewing tons of social media might get randomized to a bunch during which they might be asked to prevent altogether for an extended period. It might even be hard to enforce that humans stuck to the quantity of your time on social media to which they were assigned.
Eventually, if such a study did show that social networking sites caused depression, what would we do thereupon information? Note that within the Perlis et al study, ninety of the participants didn’t develop worsening depression scores during the year of observation. Whom would we tell, also, to refrain from too important social media use? And what demands could we make on social media companies to scale back the danger that their platforms harm internal health?
One result recently announced by the social media platform Instagram is to supply “ take a break” reminders to teenage users. The thought then’s that limiting the time people spend on social media could help adverse internal health issues. As long as it is voluntary whether a private agrees to urge these reminders or to follow their advice and obtain off the location, it is unclear how effective this can be.
We probably can not depend upon randomized trials of social media use being completed any time soon to decide if it does cause psychiatric illness. Remember, still, that we didn’t discover that cigarette smoking causes carcinoma by doing randomized trials; rather, we trusted large population studies to form that case. It is going to be that we will need to believe studies just like the Perlis et alone, large cross-sectional population studies, and other new sorts of study design to tease out whether there is an unproductive relationship then.
Right now, it might be plausible to advise a person with a history of depression or in situations that increase the danger for depression to be judicious about how important time they spend on social networking sites.
SOURCE
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/denying-the-grave/202201/does-facebook-cause-depression