Notes

Participants discussed what might be thought of as the “good”, the “bad” and the “ugly” side of social media, navigating the benefits of social media to well-being against possible negative impacts on adolescents. They differentiated personal use from third party attributions whereby they extolled the risk to adolescents outside of their personal group. Much of the negative rhetoric of social media was repeated by mental health practitioners, although there was some acknowledgement of potential benefit.

O’reilly, M. (2020). Social media and adolescent mental health: the good, the bad and the ugly. Journal of Mental Health, 29(2), 200-206.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09638237.2020.1714007

Adolescents increasingly find it difficult to picture their lives without social media. Practitioners need to be able to assess risk, and social media may be a new component to consider. Although there is limited empirical evidence to support the claim, the perception of the link between social media and mental health is heavily influenced by teenage and professional perspectives. Privacy concerns, cyberbullying, and bad effects on schooling and mental health are all risks associated with this population's usage of social media.

Khalaf, A. M., Alubied, A. A., Khalaf, A. M., & Rifaey, A. A. (2023). The impact of social media on the mental health of adolescents and young adults: a systematic review. Cureus, 15(8).
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10476631/

The findings showed that social media has negative and positive effects on mental health. Negative effects included anxiety, depression, loneliness, poor sleep quality, poor mental health indicators, thoughts of self-harm and suicide, increased levels of psychological distress, cyber bullying, body image dissatisfaction, fear of missing out and decreased life satisfaction. Positive effects included accessing other people’s health experiences and expert health information, managing depression, emotional support and community building, expanding and strengthening offline networks and interactions, self-expression and self-identity, establish and maintain relationships.

Sadagheyani, H. E., & Tatari, F. (2021). Investigating the role of social media on mental health. Mental health and social inclusion, 25(1), 41-51.
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/mhsi-06-2020-0039/full/html

We provide quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of social media on mental health by leveraging a unique natural experiment: the staggered introduction of Facebook across US colleges. Our analysis couples data on student mental health around the years of Facebook's expansion with a generalized difference-in-differences empirical strategy. We find that the rollout of Facebook at a college had a negative impact on student mental health. It also increased the likelihood with which students reported experiencing impairments to academic performance due to poor mental health. Additional evidence on mechanisms suggests the results are due to Facebook fostering unfavorable social comparisons.

Braghieri, L., Levy, R. E., & Makarin, A. (2022). Social media and mental health. American Economic Review, 112(11), 3660-3693.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.20211218&ref=twelvetables.blo

This systematic review synthesized evidence on the influence of social media use on depression, anxiety and psychological distress in adolescents. A search of PsycINFO, Medline, Embase, CINAHL and SSCI databases reaped 13 eligible studies, of which 12 were cross-sectional. Findings were classified into four domains of social media: time spent, activity, investment and addiction. All domains correlated with depression, anxiety and psychological distress. However, there are considerable caveats due to methodological limitations of cross-sectional design, sampling and measures. Mechanisms of the putative effects of social media on mental health should be explored further through qualitative enquiry and longitudinal cohort studies.

Keles, B., McCrae, N., & Grealish, A. (2020). A systematic review: the influence of social media on depression, anxiety and psychological distress in adolescents. International journal of adolescence and youth, 25(1), 79-93.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02673843.2019.1590851#abstract