Looking at young adults over time helps tease out the relationship between depression and social media use, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (1.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Which comes first, depression or social media use? Johns Hopkins child and adolescent psychiatrist Carol Vidal set out to find out.

Vidal: We basically looked at depression as an outcome variable, so looking at whether the use of social media was associated with the depression or not at the different points in time. The higher the scores at each one of the three points in time then the higher the depressive symptoms. We looked at this to see if there was any difference between the people that had depression over time, if the people that had depression were using more social media or not.                :24

Turns out there is a relationship.

Vidal: What we found is that the people that used more social media were also people that tended to have more depressive symptoms over time. If you use more social media at the beginning your symptoms were going to increase over time.    :12

Vidal says keeping an eye on social media use is wise for many reasons, including depression risk. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.