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 “We believe that at least having clinicians be aware of these
associations may be valuable to them as they treat patients with
depressive disorders. For example, they may wish to inquire about
social media use patterns and determine if those patterns are
maladaptive,” coauthor Ariel Shensa of the University of Pittsburgh
School of Medicine told Reuters Health by email.
Shensa and her team randomly selected 1,763 participants, ages
19-32, and asked them about their depressive symptoms, social media
use and addictive behaviors.
Social media use was measured by the number of visits and amount of
time spent on 11 popular social media sites: Facebook, Twitter,
Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Vine,
Snapchat and Reddit.
To assess addiction to social media, the researchers modified a
survey called the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale, looking at
addictive behaviors such as mood modification, withdrawal and
relapse.
In a presentation March 30 at the annual meeting of the Society of
Behavioral Medicine in Washington, DC, the researchers reported that
half the participants spent at least an hour a day on non-work
related social media use and made 30 site visits per week.
Depending on whether the researchers used narrow or broad criteria
for addiction, 14 to 44 percent of participants had scores that
suggested a problem.
As expected, high social media usage was linked to higher addiction
scores. But after taking addiction scores into consideration, social
media use and depression were not significantly linked.
Addiction and depression did appear to be linked, however. Addiction
seemed to explain roughly three-quarters of the effect of social
media use on depression, the researchers found.
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“Ultimately, it appears that the way social media is used, rather
than the amount social media is used, leads to maladaptive
outcomes,” says Lindsay Howard of the Virginia Consortium Program in
Clinical Psychology in Norfolk, who was not involved in the study.
Howard found similarities in the study with her own research, which
she also presented at the conference. Her team found that the act of
seeking reassurance through social media may be related to higher
degrees of dissatisfaction with one’s body and eating disorders, but
the frequency of social media use was not tied to those depressive
symptoms.
“Physicians should educate their patients regarding how social media
use may be related to depression and other negative outcomes,”
Howard said. “They might also recommend the use of applications such
as ‘Freedom’ that allow patients to limit how often and when they
use social media.” Howard says. (The Freedom app is online here:
https://freedom.to.)
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1q3vXsj Society of Behavioral Medicine, March
30, 2016
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