Effects Of Social Media Essay

1208 Words3 Pages

Today social media has become a big part of people’s lives. What people see on social media can influence their opinions and attitudes toward many social topics. Teenagers especially use social networks to gather knowledge about popularly talked about topics going on at the time. One of those topics is mental health. Mental Health has been a widely talked about topic on sites like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and many other social networks. The effects social media has on teenagers is that they can easily take the information given to them on their favorite social media sites and put it to good use involving the awareness of mental health and helping themselves and others with mental health struggles. Seeking Information Social media, and …show more content…

The media creates a lot of these negative connotations of mental health such as people with mental illness are violent, unpredictable, and do not get better. Movies also give viewers untrue facts of mental illness. Some common myths are that teenagers with depression are just going through a phase, mental illness can be considered cute or mysterious, or people with mental illness are unable to lead a fairly normal life. These stigmas and many more are things that some people on social media are trying to get rid of. Many people and groups or organizations spread the truth about these stigmas over social media sites that teenagers use most. Making regular posts about these myths help spread the word and understanding of mental illness all over the world. The truth that many high school students will experience a mental illness and not commit a crime of any sort, or the truth that mental illness can get better is widely spread. People learn about the types of mental illness’, what they consist of, and how to help a friend or even themselves if they are ever to experience this type of thing. After a study ran by In One Voice on social media trying to prevent untrue stigmas was done, there were many positive results. The results of the study says that “These findings partially confirm the skepticism that we and others have expressed previously about the ability of brief, media anti-stigma or mental health literacy campaigns to achieve and sustain meaningful improvements across a range of outcome domains” (Livingston et al., 2014, p. 989). There were significant reductions of negative stigma on social media, which will hopefully decline as time goes

Open Document