MIT Study: Social media use linked to decline in mental health

by Dylan Walsh

Researchers found a significant link between the presence of Facebook and increases in anxiety and depression among college students.

Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook at Harvard University in February 2004. Days later, 650 students had made accounts. Today, there are roughly two billion daily active users.

Concurrent with Facebook’s meteoric expansion has been growing concern over the mental well-being of adolescents and young adults. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, the suicide rate among 10- to 24-year-olds was stable from 2000 to 2007; it then increased 57% between 2007 and 2017.

Given these parallel trends, it’s important to understand the relationship between mental health and technology use, especially how youths use social media. But there have been few causal studies.

“There may be hundreds of papers that present correlations between social media and well-being, and many of them are great and highly informative, but we still know little about which way the effect runs,” saidAlexey Makarin, an assistant professor at MIT Sloan. People who use more social media may become more depressed, or, conversely, people who are more depressed may be more active on social media. “There is a lack of true causal evidence.”

Makarin and colleagues Luca Braghieri of Bocconi University and Ro’ee Levy of Tel Aviv University aim to fill this gap with a new paper, forthcoming in the American Economic Review. The researchers paired the staggered rollout of Facebook in colleges with 430,000 responses from the National College Health Assessment, a semi-annual survey of mental health and well-being on campuses across the U.S. (The survey looks at other dimensions of student health, as well, like substance use and exercise habits.) The researchers found a significant link between the presence of Facebook and a deterioration in mental health among college students.

Facebook access leads to more anxiety and depression

When Facebook began, access was restricted to people with a Harvard email address. Less than a month later, the website had expanded to Columbia, Stanford, and Yale. This progressive opening continued until September of 2006, when anybody over 13 years old was able to create an account.

Read more at mitsloan.mit.edu.