ADOLESCENTS’ INVOLVEMENT IN SOCIAL MEDIA: BEFORE AND DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Social media are an indispensable modern adolescents’ daily ritual. The present study investigates the specifics of social media influence on the adolescents’ psychological wellbeing in everyday life and during Covid-19. The research hypothesis stated that excessive social media use could provide loneliness, depression, and lack of sleep. The investigation is based on data received from interviews, questionnaires, and statistical analysis. A group of 516 psychology and medical students (78.8% females, 21.2% males) aged 15-21 took part in the study via Google Form survey conducted in Odesa I.I. Mechnikov National University, Ukraine. The participants’ overall well-being, loneliness, level of stress were assessed in correlation with personality characteristics and tendency to social media disorder. The obtained results showed that the more time adolescents spend on social media, the more real-life relationships decrease due to online isolation in social terms. The predictors of social media disorder are difficulties in relationships with family, time spent on social media and psycho-emotional background. It is determined that the social media use creates the illusion of participation and importance for a large circle of people. The study provides evidence that the unsatisfactory level of modern adolescents’ well-being can be explained by the passive use of social media, which provokes emotional lability, irritability, depression, and sleep deprivation.Social media are an indispensable modern adolescents’ daily ritual. The present study investigates the specifics of social media influence on the adolescents’ psychological wellbeing in everyday life and during Covid-19. The research hypothesis stated that excessive social media use could provide loneliness, depression, and lack of sleep. The investigation is based on data received from interviews, questionnaires, and statistical analysis. A group of 516 psychology and medical students (78.8% females, 21.2% males) aged 15-21 took part in the study via Google Form survey conducted in Odesa I.I. Mechnikov National University, Ukraine. The participants’ overall well-being, loneliness, level of stress were assessed in correlation with personality characteristics and tendency to social media disorder. The obtained results showed that the more time adolescents spend on social media, the more real-life relationships decrease due to online isolation in social terms. The predictors of social media disorder are difficulties in relationships with family, time spent on social media and psycho-emotional background. It is determined that the social media use creates the illusion of participation and importance for a large circle of people. The study provides evidence that the unsatisfactory level of modern adolescents’ well-being can be explained by the passive use of social media, which provokes emotional lability, irritability, depression, and sleep deprivation

Frequency of Instagram Use and the Presence of Depressive Symptoms in Young Adults

Background: Depression is one of the most common mental health conditions among patients seen in primary care. It is estimated that without routine screening methods, only 50 percent of patients with depression are identified in clinic. Depression screening improves diagnosis rates, but clinical outcomes are only improved if screening is included in patient-provider encounters. If depression can be detected, it can usually be successfully treated. As the number of social media platforms, like Instagram, and the number of their users grow rapidly, finding a correlation between frequency of use and depressive symptoms in young adults would call for an imperative change in screening methods for depression. Methods: An exhaustive literature search using MEDLINE-PubMed, CINAHL, and Web of Science was performed using the search terms “depression,” “social media,” and “young adult.” The articles were then searched for specific mention of “Instagram” and those that did not include Instagram specifically in the study were excluded. The “similar articles” search option on MEDLINE-PubMed and references within articles that met exclusion criteria were searched as well. The resulting studies that met criteria were then appraised and assessed for quality with GRADE. Results: Two studies that met inclusion and exclusion criteria were included in the systematic review. One cross-sectional study showed that social media use, including Instagram, was significantly associated with increased depressive symptoms. Furthermore, participants in the highest quartile of total time per day spent on social media had significantly greater odds of having depressive symptoms. The second cross-sectional study revealed that for participants who followed high amounts of strangers, a statistically significant relationship was found between increased frequency of Instagram use and increased depressive symptoms. Conclusion: Presence of depressive symptoms and Instagram use in young adults correlate. The evidence points to a relationship between an increased frequency of Instagram use and the presence of depressive symptoms. Providers should continue screening patients for depression following the current guidelines but should remain aware of the relationship between frequency of Instagram use and depressive symptoms. If risk factors in patients’ social media habits are present, providers should consider administering depression screening for further investigation of possible depressive symptoms. Keywords: Instagram, depression, young adults, social medi

The link between Facebook addiction and depression among university students: evidence from a lower‐middle income country

Background and Aims Among all the social media, Facebook is the most popular social networking site among students. That raises a chance of excessive Facebook usage being a form of addiction to hamper students' mental health. The primary goal of this study was to find the association of Facebook addiction with the depression level of university students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Method Four hundred ten university students from Bangladesh were selected randomly as samples for this investigation. In this study, the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale and nine-item Patient Health Questionnaire were used to assess the level of Facebook Addiction and depression status of the students, respectively. Ordered probit models were employed to identify the connection between Facebook addiction and depression. Ordinary least square models were utilized further to check the robustness of the findings. Results Ordered probit results confirm that Facebook addiction increases the likelihood of having heightened depression among university students. Besides, sex, household income, and history of being infected by COVID-19 also appeared to be correlated with the depression level of the students. Conclusion Creating opportunities for students to participate in more physically demanding outdoor activities should be prioritized as it could ultimately enhance their capacity to mitigate depression. Appropriate measures must be taken to increase the number of recreational facilities on the campus for students, considering their age, gender, and preferences

Multi-class Categorization of Reasons behind Mental Disturbance in Long Texts

Motivated with recent advances in inferring users' mental state in social media posts, we identify and formulate the problem of finding causal indicators behind mental illness in self-reported text. In the past, we witness the presence of rule-based studies for causal explanation analysis on curated Facebook data. The investigation on transformer-based model for multi-class causal categorization in Reddit posts point to a problem of using long-text which contains as many as 4000 words. Developing end-to-end transformer-based models subject to the limitation of maximum-length in a given instance. To handle this problem, we use Longformer and deploy its encoding on transformer-based classifier. The experimental results show that Longformer achieves new state-of-the-art results on M-CAMS, a publicly available dataset with 62\% F1-score. Cause-specific analysis and ablation study prove the effectiveness of Longformer. We believe our work facilitates causal analysis of depression and suicide risk on social media data, and shows potential for application on other mental health conditions

#Sleepyteens: social media use in adolescence is associated with poor sleep quality, anxiety, depression and low self-esteem

This study examined how social media use related to sleep quality, self-esteem, anxiety and depression in 467 Scottish adolescents. We measured overall social media use, nighttime-specific social media use, emotional investment in social media, sleep quality, self-esteem and levels of anxiety and depression. Adolescents who used social media more – both overall and at night – and those who were more emotionally invested in social media experienced poorer sleep quality, lower self-esteem and higher levels of anxiety and depression. Nighttime-specific social media use predicted poorer sleep quality after controlling for anxiety, depression and self-esteem. These findings contribute to the growing body of evidence that social media use is related to various aspects of wellbeing in adolescents. In addition, our results indicate that nighttime-specific social media use and emotional investment in social media are two important factors that merit further investigation in relation to adolescent sleep and wellbeing

Mental health-related conversations on social media and crisis episodes: a time-series regression analysis

We aimed to investigate whether daily fluctuations in mental health-relevant Twitter posts are associated with daily fluctuations in mental health crisis episodes. We conducted a primary and replicated time-series analysis of retrospectively collected data from Twitter and two London mental healthcare providers. Daily numbers of ‘crisis episodes’ were defined as incident inpatient, home treatment team and crisis house referrals between 2010 and 2014. Higher volumes of depression and schizophrenia tweets were associated with higher numbers of same-day crisis episodes for both sites. After adjusting for temporal trends, seven-day lagged analyses showed significant positive associations on day 1, changing to negative associations by day 4 and reverting to positive associations by day 7. There was a 15% increase in crisis episodes on days with above-median schizophrenia-related Twitter posts. A temporal association was thus found between Twitter-wide mental health-related social media content and crisis episodes in mental healthcare replicated across two services. Seven-day associations are consistent with both precipitating and longer-term risk associations. Sizes of effects were large enough to have potential local and national relevance and further research is needed to evaluate how services might better anticipate times of higher risk and identify the most vulnerable groups

Self-Concealment, Perceived Discrimination, and African American Treatment Choices for Major Depression

African Americans have a higher proclivity to depression than other ethnic groups in the United States and also have a greater propensity to avoid seeking professional mental health treatment. The available research has shown that racial and cultural barriers such as perceived discrimination and self-concealment are the primary factors that negatively affect African Americans\u27 attitudes toward mental health itself and mental health treatment. Perceived discrimination and self-concealment may also negatively affect whether African Americans seek help for depression and from whom, but further investigation was needed. The quantitative survey study provided answers to which factors influence whether and where African Americans seek help for major depression. A total of 147 participants were recruited through word of mouth, local churches, community organizations, and virtual venues such as electronic mail and social media. Multivariate analysis of variance revealed the mean scores of African Americans\u27 use of natural supports and their use of outpatient treatment (dependent variables) were not equal across all levels of their self-concealment, perceived discrimination, and depressive symptoms (independent variables). Multivariate analysis of covariance revealed that the mean scores remained the same when controlling for gender, income, education, and relationship status (covariates). The results suggest that the latter factors influence African Americans\u27 decisions on where to seek help for depression regardless of their gender and socioeconomic status. Increasing the propensity of African Americans to seek professional help for depression should improve the mental health of the population as a whole and reduce the incidents of serious mental illness of those who are treated

An Examination of the Individual and Contextual Characteristics Associated with Active Shooter Events

In recent years, the US has experienced a substantial number of mass shooting incidents. This type of shooting incident has been termed “active shooter event” and encompasses shootings that occur in school settings as well as public settings and workplace venues. Much of the recent published literature addressing active shooter events appears to focus on tactical issues, such as training for and responding to this type of incident. Very little research, however, has examined the individual and contextual characteristics associated with active shooter events. In the current study we examine a number of factors related to 88 active shooting events involving 92 perpetrators. Our findings indicate a history of psychological and behavioral issues reported in more than 50% of the active shooters studied. In addition, 60% of shooters had evidence of additional stressors beyond those associated with psychological and behavioral issues. These findings highlight the need to continue to explore potential risk factors associated with this form of violence