![]() Often, people all too easily forget that the perfect lives portrayed in the highly-curated timelines of others are little more than an exercise in “image management” with all the sad and dull aspects that constitute much of day-to-day reality deliberately left out. Social media sites can also be an ideal vector for cyberbullying and sometimes promote feelings of inadequacy amongst individuals with low self-esteem. This can range from users mistakenly thinking it can replace face-to-face human contact, which is known to help alleviate depression, to promoting anxiety through addictive behavior caused by FOMO or Fear of Missing Out. Though social media certainly has a role to play in combatting loneliness and isolation, as perhaps best evidenced during the past 12 months of the coronavirus pandemic, it also drives a panoply of risk factors for anxiety and depression. However, particularly where young people are concerned, the role giant mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram might play in fueling a mental health crisis in young people is also under the microscope. "Without those forums, I think my daughter would have struggled to find the information that she was looking for about how to die," Callie’s mother Sarah told the BBC. ![]() In an article published on the BBC website last year, the mother of 24-year-old Callie Lewis, who ended her own life in August 2018 following an extensive period visiting suicide forums, warned against the dangers that lurk in those darkest and most desperate areas of the web. Her comments around social media may be interpreted and unpacked in two ways.įirstly, many questions remain over whether the likes of Google should be doing more to prevent the visibility of online suicide forums, particularly those where users offer advice on different methods of suicide. “Reducing the use of social media during the night hours might be an effective means of providing targeted psychological interventions in some individuals.” “Extensive use of social media has been associated with disturbed sleep, anxiety, depression and low self-esteem,” said Dutta. Twenty-one years on, we are all certainly living with a very different world wide web to that which existed in 2000 and Dutta also addressed the pivotal impact of social media on mental health. Tragically, 23 men and women chose to end their despair by taking their own life on that day – more than double the daily average for the previous ten years. This was illustrated most harrowingly in a news article published in The Guardian back in 2005, which reported that on new year’s day 2000, as the world celebrated the dawn of a new millennium, England and Wales reported the highest number of daily suicides on recent record. Underlying this could be a subconscious sense of disappointment that the promise of a fresh start, subtly implied by the onset of the new time period, has failed to bring with it a change in someone’s depression, mood and overall state of mind. Instead, it could be ascribed to a so-called “ new beginning theory.” This is where those experiencing emotional pain and suicidal thoughts find their negative feelings intensifying during the transition to a new time period such as the start of a new week. The Monday phenomenon is not thought to be anything to do with the start of the working week, as the pattern of Monday suicides is consistent across different age groups, including retirees. Such measures might include enhanced website moderation at critical times of day, or organizations that offer phone-based support to individuals experiencing acute emotional distress like the Samaritans ramping up the number of volunteers on-call during these periods.Ĭoncerning the earlier studies on the prevalence of suicide attempts on a Monday cited by Dutta, a 2014 study published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine reached similar conclusions when analyzing over a million attempted suicides by poison in the United States.
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