Social media are various online platforms that allow users (people, both old and young) to interact in a virtual environment. Through interaction, they create and share content, and they also interact with the various content. These contents, most of which are not regulated, are accessible to both old and young. The focus of this write-up is on social media and how it affects the mental health of adolescents, whether it has a positive or negative impact.
So, who is an adolescent? An adolescent is an individual between the ages of 10 and 19. It is a traditional stage from childhood to adulthood, and at this stage of development, various emotional and psychological changes happen in them, which make them very vulnerable to various environmental influences, and as was referenced earlier, most of the contents on social media are not regulated. And because of these, many adolescents have misconstrued how to navigate identity formation, how to manage peer relationships, and above all, how to regulate their emotions and perceptions about the various contents they see on social media.
Moving forward, what is mental health in adolescents? This is the emotional, social and psychological well being of a a child transitioning into adulthood and these three traits or factors are what encompasses a child's emotional regulation, thought patterns and behavioral patterns, how to manage feelings, responses to situations, responses to what they see and hear, perceiving, processing and interpreting information and making choices. The latter, that is the way they perceive information and make choices, is what social media has influenced.
Social media, I must say, has numerous benefits, but the damage it has caused in adolescents far outweighs the benefits as regards how they perceive, process, and make decisions based on what they see on social media.
If we are to really go into details on how social media has caused lots of damage to adolescents' mental health, the write-up will end up being boring, so I would like to touch on a few out of numerous hazards.
**The first one is unrealistic expectations, what we see on social media is not how it works for real, those contents present some kind of unrealistic picture of live, the adolescents believe that's how it is or that's how it should really play out and in the end, they don't get what they expect. This leads to many dead ends, like depression and the like.
**The case of the popular saying "School Na Scam," meaning education is a scam, started on social media, and it has sunk into the brains of the young generation, which has led to them showing an ill attitude to education. The reason for also believing that is true is because of the life of affluence being displayed on social media, most especially by those who are completely uneducated, and society even respects them, whereas the educated ones struggle to make ends meet.
Many cases have also surfaced, like the case of a secondary school girl involved in a sex scandal, all these were a result of unregulated immoral content on social media.
Adolescents, who have options of adopting the benefits of social media, have rather emulated and adopted the terrible ones. It has changed their level of reasoning from the right direction to a heartbreaking, immoral, and disturbing sense of reasoning.
I can only suggest that nothing can be done to regulate all these misleading contents, the parents have a crucial role to play when their children are growing into adolescence. They need to be educated on the use of phones and given the necessary orientation.
This is my response to the #scifimultiverse community for the week.
The image is a screenshot of my phone screen.