Social Media And Psychological Disorders

The Interface Between Social Media and Psychological Disorders

It is 3 AM in the morning and Jamie wakes up out of a deep sleep. The first thing Jamie does is check her Facebook page for any activity she may have missed. Jamie logs onto her home page and notices that she does not have any new notifications. She looks at the last picture she posted and realizes that nobody has made any comments or hit the like button on the posts she made before she went to sleep. Jamie feels upset that her post has not garnered her any new comments or likes. She shouts…. “it’s been 10 hours since I posted that picture why hasn’t anyone else commented on it!” Jamie spends the next couple of hours scrolling through Facebook looking at her friend’s pictures and posts. After a thorough examination, she feels depressed because her friend posted a picture 2 hours ago and has received twenty likes and seven comments about her post. Social media has the ability to alter the emotions of individuals.

People feel they are on top of the world due to the numerous friends that they have on their Facebook page. Having Facebook friends provides them with a sense of acceptance they had never experienced. These experiences are a gateway to a stream of emotions that has the potential to harm as well as to help. Social media has helped to emotionally feel connected and is an easy and efficient way to stay in contact with family and friends; however, it is harmful when it is the culprit for facilitating and fueling arguments and unhealthy relationships. “As the Danish academic Anders Colding-Jorgensen argues: ‘We should no longer see the internet as a post office where information is sent back and forth, but rather as an openarena for our identity and self-pro...

... middle of paper ...

...avy use of social media platforms and the Dark Triad—a cluster of personality traits that includes psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism” (Mariani 85). “A 2013 study by German researchers supports Fox’s Pavlovian hunch. In it, the authors found that individuals who spent more time on Facebook had higher levels of activity in the nucleus accumbens-the brain’s reward center. Perhaps social media not only activate the reward center of the brain, but over time train it to respond more intensely to social praise” (Mariani 88).

“Some people who are narcissistically vulnerable have difficulty maintaining a cohesive sense of self because of ubiquitous shame, resulting from the conclusion that they fundamentally fall short of some internal ideal. They look for constant reinforcement from others to bolster their fragile self-images “(Bender 880).