Much has been made about the impact of social media on mental well-being. But can spending time on Facebook actually make you depressed? critica_life investigates.
The paper’s lead author is Roy Perlis, a psychiatrist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University in Boston and is titled “The authors note that a number of studies have hinted at this association between social media and depression, but most of them have been cross sectional or involved only a small number of participants, making it impossible to draw any cause-and-effect conclusion.
In the Perlis et al. study, more than 5000 people with a mean age of 55.8 years and who had very low scores at baseline on the nine-item Patient Health Questionnaire , indicating that they were not depressed, were surveyed approximately monthly between May 2020 and May 2021, with measures of social media use and repeat PHQ-9 at each month.