Researchers at Pennsylvania State University and Jinan University in Guangzhou, China, have linked excessive social media use to depression and secondary trauma.
In a report published in ‘Computers in Human Behaviour’, the researchers surveyed 320 participants living in Wuhan about how they accessed and shared health information with friends, family members and colleagues over WeChat, China’s most popular social media app.
They also used a stress scale to measure anxiety and depression by asking participants to rate statements such as “I felt that life was meaningless’’ and “I had disturbing dreams about the coronavirus epidemic,” to arrive at their findings.
Bu Zhong, a professor of Journalism at Penn State and co-author of the study, said the team began looking into the effect of social media use on people’s mental health right after Wuhan was locked down to curb the spread of the pandemic.
He stated, “We didn’t expect that this would become a pandemic. We were just thinking that we could reveal some invisible harm caused by the outbreak.
“In China’s situation, local media was not reporting on COVID-19. If you just read the local newspaper and watched television, you didn’t get information about the virus. This made people extremely stressed, and they began relying overwhelmingly on social media.”
The researchers observed that more than half of the participants, none of whom reported any traumatic or depressive disorders before the pandemic, experienced some level of depression.
Nearly 20 per cent of participants reported a moderate to severe level of depression, and slightly more than 20 per cent reported moderate to severe levels of secondary trauma, which can occur when people hear about the traumatic experiences of others.
Based on the researchers’ model, excessive use of social media was linked with more severe levels of depression and secondary trauma.
At the same time, Zhong said that was important to understand how all types of social media, including platforms like Facebook and Twitter, could help people during a health crisis.
“I think when disasters find us, we tend to go to our social networks more to get help and reach out. It’s human nature. We don’t want people to think social media is bad.
“We just want them to know there is a balance, and when you go over the threshold, like checking every five or 10 minutes, it can bring even more stress to yourself,” he said.
The researchers argued that it was possible that people who consumed more health information on WeChat attached excessive importance to the content, experiencing more depression and secondary trauma than those who used the platform less.
They suggested social media breaks during a stressful health crisis like the pandemic.
“We should not blame social media. We should just pay attention to how we are using it,” Zhong said.
