Social Media, Depression, and ADHD

A few months ago, I wrote a letter to a friend whose sibling committed suicide. I attempted to explain the consequences digital interaction can have on mental health. This is the first of a series of three posts, based on that letter. As the title suggests, it is focused on the connection between social media, depression, and ADHD.

These insights are based off my work experience, my education at UPenn, my field research, studies from the Max Planck Institute, and my interviews with Mary Ann Layden (Head of Education, Cognitive Therapy at University of Pennsylvania).

“Hey _________ (name not disclosed for privacy reasons),

I may have told you I was a product manager at a venture backed advertising technology partner of Facebook. I may have mentioned that afterwards, I started doing research on interaction with new forms of digital media like social media (which I was exposed to over the summer in a unique way) and the relationship between that interaction and the increase in observed symptoms of mental health issues like depression and ADHD. My assumption was that there is some causal connection between our relationships with new forms of digital media that we heavily interact with and the observed mental health issues that myself and others have experienced.

I ended up concluding that there is reason to believe in a causal connection between those relationships and those mental health issues, and that there is a need for people to not only better understand that connection, but also understand how to reshape their interaction with new forms of digital media in order to reduce exposure to those negative consequences.

I wanted to share a few ideas here that I think are worth considering, looking back on all my research and reflection, if you are still involved in this space.

First, I’ll start with social media.

I may have mentioned before that I think interaction with social media is definitely an agent for symptoms of depression, mainly because of how interaction with the news feed streamlines peer comparison — what is known in the psychology community as fantasy social comparison — which we know contributes to symptoms of depression through social anxiety: feelings of inferiority and insecurity after subconsciously contrasting romanticized, glorified projections of others with our isolated selfs behind the electric screen.

Moreover, people are motivated to interact with social media in the first place in conditions of weakness and stress, so that selective turnout bias inflames the consequences of that social fantasy comparison.

Users then tend to respond to the social anxiety from fantasy social comparison by seeking external validation, by uploading content. At best this leads to externalized self esteem with content that has been publicly supported and at worst backfires (when validation does not arrive). Even if validation does arrive, externalized self esteem on social media is an issue because it actually deprecates, rather than reinforces, the internal source of self esteem, as the content being validated is typically not representative of our inner selves.

As a result, we have seen multiple times in experimental longitudinal studies in and out of the U.S that increased use of social media is casually connected to increased symptoms of depression. This is because, as explained, the user experience tends towards being a feedback loop around two axes: social fantasy comparison and externalized self esteem, which we both know are causes of depression.

Now, interaction with social media is also an agent of symptoms of ADHD. Paranoia of digital public social interaction, a paranoia that is purposefully designed into our user experience through the actual system design of social media, motivates us to constantly check social media for notifications, to reduce anxiety of digital public social interaction.

Notifications transmute awareness of digital public social interaction, and thus checking for their presence alleviates anxiety of digital public social interaction. Either we don’t have them and we don’t have digital public social interaction, or we do have them, and we can immediately check to see what it is, and potentially take action and shield ourselves from public social interaction that we don’t want, or enjoy the excitement from receiving positive digital public social interaction.

The issue is that these notifications — which we check to reduce anxiety from public vulnerability — arrive in unpredictable time periods, driving obsession psychological engagement. Our interaction with notifications becomes obsessive, like our interaction with all variable rewards.

So we constantly are motivated to check social media with the core underlying purpose of checking for the presence of notifications, which provides gratification from reducing the anxiety from vulnerability to positive or negative public digital social interaction. The desire to monitor notifications, alongside the unpredictability with which they will arrive, drives the compulsive checking of social media, partially explaining why we expose ourselves to social media to the degree that we do despite the psychological consequences from actually using social media that we know in our hearts and have seen now from studies.

The issue underlying vulnerability driving obsession with notifications is the design of permanent comments, permanent (maximalist) content culture, and our maximalist “friend” culture. These things, which are steered through the design of social media, cause us to upload lots of content that can be interacted with in a public way. And we have an artificially large number of friends, increasing our perception of vulnerability online: vulnerability not just in terms of how people can interact with our content, but more broadly in terms of how people’s understandings of ourselves can change depending on public interaction with our content (particularly for the long tail of “friends” on social networks that do not know us well enough).

In any case, because of vulnerability to permanent public interaction online, visible by such a large audience of people, we continually check social media to reduce anxiety of that vulnerability, resulting in symptoms of ADHD and continuous distraction. There are other theories mentioned by others regarding addictive use of social media but this is my belief of what is core.

Anyways, this may all sound super crazy, but I have spent a ton of time reading, reflecting, researching, and writing about these topics. I was thinking about you recently and wanted to share some of the thoughts on a surface level here, because I know you have been so impacted and are deeply involved in this topic area.

My general conclusion is that interaction with social media definitely may be a driver of a lot of the mental health consequences being observed today. More than most believe, especially for young girls who seem to be most psychologically vulnerable to the consequences of fantasy social comparison and the loop between social fantasy comparison and externalized self esteem that I have described.

In the writing I have been working on, I explain this loop more. I go into the interaction design of social media and how it motivates people to upload superficial content that powers fantasy social comparison, and I go into how the interaction design can change to make the content culture more authentic. I go into the conflict of interest between social media’s business needs and users’ needs, which is an underlying cause of this addictive, harmful interaction. Lastly, I provide strategies for reshaping use of social media for those who have been impacted — to preserve social media, to maintain it while not being exposed to negative consequences. Some of those recommendations can be found here.”

Thanks for reading. If you feel pained by your digital life and want to understand and improve your digital relationships, please join here.

I will explain the relationship I’ve found between mental health consequences and cognitive overstimulation in the next post.

Social Media, Depression, and ADHD was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.