The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health of Young Teens

Abstract:

Many people seem to understand a brief overview of how social media is affecting mental health. In this Project, I aim to inform readers about the complexity of how the mental health of specifically on young teens whom seem to have had the most change in their daily life and communication between their peers. This essay will explore a variety of perspectives from different kinds of resources which includes views from Specialists , parents , and the young teens themselves. It would be interesting to see how the different age groups would respond to the question this papert is based on. This paper seeks to answer the question: How do different forms of historical fictional media make an impact on our understanding of the past?

Introduction:

Social media have played a huge and important role in shaping who I am today and my daily life; At about age of 12 I was introduced to social media, sometimes spending hours engrossing myself in the the world of the internet, talking to my friends . As I continuously exposed myself to social media I can start to see how it has impacted my life both negatively and positively. I started to pay close attention to the amount of my time in which i spend on my phone and on social media. I have also taken into account how the negative and positive impacts the amount of time in which i spend on my phone and on social media.

With that being said, my aim for this Project is to find out to what extent is social media is affecting mental health on young teens. Before this project was given my sister whom is 10 years of age has also started to become addicted to her electronics including her phone which she spends most of her time on which also has affected her attitude when she is forced to put it down. I was very interested to see why this is and what apps she spends most of her time on and see if it is mostly games and she is frustrated that she is unable to continue, or if she is actually on social media and is suffering a kind of withdrawal to the social media app. This got me motivated to choose this question to research on.

I will be using various kinds of research methods and resources to gather an abundance of information that will provide an answer to the Project this will include checking both of my parents, my little sister, my cousin whom is a young adult and my phones to see which apps we have been on most and see how to results differ in the age gap. This I thought would be very interesting to see as well what they are using to apps for. For example i use whatsapp to communicate with my friends and parents but my cousins who are young adults although they do use it to communicate with their friends as well as use it for work. I will also be using the internet for my research and watch interviews with media influencers to find out their opinion on how social media is affecting their audience which is usually young teens.

In order to gather high-quality, reliable and credible information to answer my question however this topic will not have a straightforward answer because there are always going to be different points of view and the media can affect some teens differently but I will try to include most of the different points of views and include them in my essay. I shall be utilising a variety of different research methods to gather information from both primary and secondary sources. I actually had to take into consideration the different methods that would be best suited for gathering information for my Project considering the question i was trying to answer , I tried to make the research methods that i used as creative and original as possible still taking into consideration my question and if i would get valid and informative answers from it. However, I needed to ensure that my methods and resources were reliable and made sense to my question.

As the Project title I have selected would require a lot of objective information and so i have tasked myself to come up with a creative and hopefully original way to collect primary research that would provide me with detailed results. A combination of a case study, experiment, a couple of interviews and a survey will help me achieve the information needed to complete my essay. To ensure that i get a variety of results I have gathered a selection of candidates who were diverse in gender, age, and time on social media to participate in my research.

I will be taking the answers of my chosen candidates and will be putting them in my chosen categories or groups based on their similarities to one another so that making sense of the qualitative data I have received so the data I have collected will be less complicated and more straightforward and easy to interpret. I will be able to evaluate the reliability of my chosen methods of research by doing the tests more than one and collecting data from people's phones more than once to have more reliability.

The resources I gathered information from for my secondary research are from online sites.

I found multiple sites to help me answer my question. To ensure that the websites in which i am using as resources are reliable, I will make sure to read and gather resources and search domains ending in .edu, .gov, or .org, and that the authors of the articles or electronic journals have a well established background on the subject matter.

The Millennial generation is the best and worst generation to be born into. This generation of now teens range from teens who were born between the early 1990s and the early 2000s. Social media has not only been invented within this time frame ,and like everything in life it has been changed multiple times throughout the upbringing of the millennials lives thus forming their everyday lives. Human interaction meaning face to face is slowly dying off because of the rise in social media because the millennials think that if they can talk on text what is the point of making the effort to meet up when the other person is right at your fingertips. The face-to-face interaction that used to be the "norm" to our parents and their parents and their parents is being replaced with tweets, posts, and tags made by the new age of millennials. This is said not to be a curse on their generation, but some argue that this is a blessing. It is not unusual in this new age with all this new means of transport and technology for to have families that live miles and miles apart some go to the extent of living on the other side of the world or on a different continent. But with the help of new found social media such as skype, whatsapp and instagram, these families are able to communicate faster and easier as well as seeing each other face to face throughout the help of skype and other apps like it. According to Elon Journal of undergraduate research, 97% of the teenagers and owns a computer, 94% of them own a mobile phone, 56% owns a MP3 player, 76% use instant messaging, 40% and 34% use internet as a primary news source. Social media within our generation shows the same withdrawal symptoms of a drug addict. I have personally noticed this change on my own sister because if she has her hands on her ipad or her iphone she becomes moody and throws tantrums within the next 10 minutes.

Going into how important it is for mental health disorders to be recognised according to the World Health Organization mental health issues or in other words disorders is definitely the largest cause of mental health disability in young teens. within North America, according to calculations around 15%–20% of millennials are suffering from a mental disorder they differ for many people but all have bad side effects. Furthermore, about according to their research 70% of mental disorders develop before the teens reach the age of 25, this has made the adolescent years of the teens lives a critical period in their lives in which mental health can be promoted and may help the teens in their adolescent lives , and mental health problems can be addressed and taught about and eventually help them in the future if they know the symptoms and if they know that they are not alone in whatever they are dealing with.

If these mental disorders are left untreated, the mental disorders from the teens can actually impede all of their aspects of health, including their emotional and physical well-being as well as their social development, leaving young people feeling socially isolated as well as feeling stigmatized, and wont be able to optimize their social as well as their vocational, and the teens interpersonal contributions to society and surroundings such as at home and school. Addressing these mental health problems at an early stage in life can eventually lead to the decrease in their emotional and behavioral problems, functional impairment in the future. This small act end up also leading to improvements in social interactions with peers and adults and behavioral adjustment within their school life, and school performance which can end up leading to a brighter future for them. There is an estimated amount of about 15 million of the nations teens have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder and these are only the ones who have been diagnosed we are still in the dark as to how many teens are actually facing these problems alone and have not seeked help not knowing what they are feeling and if they are feeling something that could be abnormal when in fact it is very common and can be helped. Many more of them are at risk having a mental disorder due to factors within their biology or genetics or within their families, as well as in schools due to the stress of their grades, and among their peers this could involve being bullied or being isolated for a long period of time.

According to Northshore University Healthsystem the longer that the adolescents time is spent and are engaged with the various social media apps, the higher the risk that will be for sleep deprivation, low self-esteem, and increases in depression or anxiety (and other mental health issues). The more emotionally invested these teens are into their figure online and especially if it is only one app in particular, the more pressure will be put upon them to constantly update their platform just as the celebrities that many people look up to do. What they do not realise is that these people do this professionally and their entire lives revolve around keeping their audience engaged and up to date. These celebrities also only post all of the fun things that they are doing and some of these are fake making their audience who believe it extremely jealous and have tendencies to develop mental illnesses because they feel as if this is real and their is so bad because the cannot afford to do all those glamorous things that celebrities are able to do.

Teens will always been nervous of asking parents or other adults to seek advice in the fear of getting in trouble or being judged. However with the the thousands of friends on the new found social media reachable with the touch of a finger, teenagers will now often turn to their social networks in the hopes to seek to seek advice and solutions to their problems which at times could be quite bad then being naive and that is often misguided because they are unprotected and in an extremely vulnerable situation.

Cyberbullying the definition according to is when somebody uses a form of technology usually a phone or computer to send mean or threatening messages to or about another person with the intention of getting a reaction of hurting them to perhaps give the bully satisfaction or to make themselves feel better. It can come is any form including by texting the person directly or by saying it in a group chat or even posting about them online. Cyberbullying can be anonymous, which means people have a safety net so they won't get caught or get into trouble or be judged. The internet has a huge audience and so will also have a wide audience to their opinion, and can spread quickly in the hopes that other people will join in and agree with their opinion. As the targets to this form of bullying they almost get no stop to this constant abuse by their peers and even total strangers and as the targets they would probably feel as if they are unable can’t get away from the constant nonstop bullying that is plaguing their lives. For example if a classmate is bullying you at school, when you leave school and go home it’s over you can rest and recuperate and if things get really bab you can even change schools. But with cyberbullying there really is not an end to it. It can follow you home, and continue all night follow you to a different school and since this is on the internet if is almost impossible to erase. Strangers, even friends, are now able to cower behind their screens and say things they could never say to your face but with the safety of being anonymous they can say whatever they want behind a screen and a fake username.

It is now extremely common for teens, especially for young girls who dont know better, to experience an extensive amount of pressure because of celebrities and their peers to appear “perfect” online. They now feel the need to appear to have perfect hair by putting unnatural colors into it or even burning their hair to get a completely straight or a curly look, to look skinny or fit by developing eating disorders as well as using photoshop and other app like it in order to look perfect and receive as many ‘likes’ and comments as possible or to have the perfect cliche can end up consuming the teens who don’t know any better. Not meeting these invisible standards of the perfect teen can cause thoughts such as self-loathing and self-doubt. Social comparison is another side effect of these invisible standards, jealousy can also end up resulting from this when they see their friends on social media appearing to be more popular or attractive or on a glamorous and expensive vacation which others may not be able to afford, which can trigger depressive feelings thinking that all of what they see on social media is real when in fact is probably not because they are also trying to live up to this unrealistic standard.

Northshore University Healthsystem also states that social media can be harmful towards teens and their mental health but there are some benefits that can come from it. Social media can sometimes gives a safe environment and some support for teenagers, which they may or may not lacking in normal friendships such as in class or in an extracurricular activity. Marginalized adolescents – such as lesbian, bi, gay and transgender teens or teenagers with disabilities – often benefit from this the most. Finding an online support group or friends who are experiencing the same thing can give them a safe channel to ask questions, express their feelings, etc.