Pandemic: signs of depression linked to too much social media use: study
- More than half of the participants in Wuhan survey report some level of depression
- Take breaks from online platforms during stressful times, researchers suggest
Bu Zhong, a journalism professor at Penn State and a co-author of the study, said the team began looking into the effects of social media use on mental health soon after Wuhan was locked down to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
“We didn’t expect that this would become a global pandemic,” he said. “We were just thinking that we could reveal some invisible harms caused by the outbreak. In China’s situation, local media was not reporting on Covid-19. If you just read the local newspaper and watched television, you didn’t get information about the virus. This made people extremely stressed, and they began relying overwhelmingly on social media.”
Previous research has shown that more people are relying on social media to find and share health information during times of crisis. The Harris Poll found that between late March and early May, 46 per cent to 51 per cent of American adults reported using social media more often than before the pandemic.