How Social Media Affects Teen Mental Health

Social networks have become a tool for constant interaction between people from all over the world. world, and in younger generations, it has even become a fundamental extension of their life Social. These digital platforms are really useful in many ways, but they can also lead to the appearance of adverse psychological phenomena to be taken into account, especially in children and adolescents.

At present, more and more young people make constant use of these virtual spaces, and precisely for this reason it is necessary understand how social media affects adolescent mental health.

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This is how social networks can affect the mental health of adolescents

In the first place, it is necessary to clarify that there is no determining formula by which using social networks must necessarily produce harmful psychological effects; it all depends on how users use these tools. However, in practice, it is being seen that the younger segment of the population is especially vulnerable to a series of psychological alterations facilitated by the misuse of these spaces of Internet. Let's see what they are.

1. Group pressure

As in almost all areas of adolescence, the world of social networks often exerts great pressure on adolescents that often goes unnoticed by parents and educators.

Access to social networks is currently occurring at increasingly younger ages based on the "fear of missing out on what the rest is doing", and it often happens that the group of friends that interacts in a certain social network tends to exert great pressure on the person who does not participate in it. Teenagers who are not interested in using these digital platforms feel left out, until they there comes a point where they feel the need to start using them so as not to be left out of the group of friends.

This type of group pressure can generate alterations related to low self-esteem, since these young people feel ignored and even experience how they should behave in a way that does not fit with their personality in order to have adequate visibility in that digital medium.

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2. Psychological consequences of cyberbullying

Cyberbullying is the term by which harassment that takes place on the Internet is known, and it can occur in all kinds of social networks or applications that are normally accessed today.

This type of harassment is one of the most recent forms of discrimination and psychological violence that exist due to to the rise of new technologies, which allow the youngest to have great visibility and even make possible coordinated stalking attacks involving dozens of people.

Social media bullying has the same devastating effect on the person experiencing it as bullying. classic school, but it is characterized by being more difficult to detect both by parents and by teachers.

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3. Social isolation in face-to-face relationships

In some adolescents who suffer any type of bullying at school or who do not have relationships positive in person with your peer group, social media can also severely affect your mental health when doing to internalize the idea that these relationships can replace those that occur face to face.

To avoid this situation, it is essential that parents monitor their children's activity on the Internet and social networks. social, so that they are not emotionally affected due to harassment or the emptiness that other persons.

4. Low self-esteem

Low self-esteem is one of the classic emotional problems in the adolescent stage and the misuse of social networks can also have this same effect. In particular, girls seem more likely to develop complexes with their own body, due to the constant assessment of the idealized image of influencers.

This phenomenon poses a real danger to the mental and physical health of very young girls whose problems emotional and self-esteem can end up leading, in extreme cases, to behavioral disorders food.

In this sense, it should also be noted that some social networks contain user communities that extol behavior associated with anorexia, bulimia and megarexia, promoting unhealthy lifestyles and diets, or simply offering a constant barrage of unrealistic models of very thin or very low-fat men and women bodily.

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5. political polarization

As has been known for some years, some social networks promote political polarization and the division of opinions in order to have more interactions between their users.

This phenomenon can also affect the psychological and mental health of adolescents who use this type of social network, people who have not yet fully formed their personality and who can be highly influenced by political radicalization and hate speech.

6. Constant use of social networks due to a dependency process

Many adolescents are at risk of acquiring behavioral dynamics similar to those of an addiction: they feel the need to always be "glued to the screen". This is largely due to the skill with which social media algorithms provide a feed uninterrupted content selected taking into account the preferences of each person, which is a non-stop distraction.

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7. The main positive side of networks: self-affirmation based on diversity

Social networks can also be used by adolescents to discover new hobbies that positively affect their mental health or that contribute to building their adult personality.

Well used, these networks can have a very positive effect on adolescents, and in many cases they constitute an element of socialization or learning of large amounts of knowledge. Specific, it has been seen that these digital platforms are especially helpful for LGBT youth who do not have access to other people with the same concerns and experience in their immediate environment.