Social Media, Self Esteem, and Mental Health
By Ovini Pathirana
According to PEW Research data, 72% of the public use some kind of social media platform. This data implies that majority of people are using these sites. If these sites can make negative impact on their user’s mental health, that means majority of the people can be harmed by social media.
Because of social media applications such as Instagram and Snapchat, beauty editing filters have become a very common thing in our lives. Every social media site has their own beauty editing features that let people edit their looks and post those edited images and videos on their accounts. According to the latest data, these photo editing apps and beauty filters can make people motivated to get cosmetic surgeries and feel low self-esteem (Lyles & Writer, 2019). This is a negative impact of using social media. Admiring an edited version of your face over your natural look is a sad situation. But unfortunately, that is the reality for many people today. According to research conducted by the John Hopkins University, “increasing social media use, number of images posted per week, was positively associated with consideration of cosmetic surgery” (Lyles & Writer, 2019).
We are living during a pandemic right now. Almost everything has changed in our ordinary lives. The way we go out, the way we communicate, even how we do our job has been changed due to the situation. But there is something else that has changed too. That is the annual rate of cosmetic surgeries done during last year. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ latest annual statistics, the number of plastic surgeries done in America increased during the pandemic (Taylor & DeBakey, 2021). It is possible that there is a connection between an increase in cosmetic surgery rate and the pandemic. We have attended staff meetings or joined classes while sitting in our living room with our laptops. All these long zoom video conferences have changed many peoples’ lives. People started to see their faces more because of these video conferences. They begin to start noticing the imperfections on their faces.
Today, majority of people use social media. Most of the time we see images of men and women with perfect looks. On social media, we see people who appear to go to the gym every day, and have a dreamy look and perfect skin. In the past, most of these “perfect looks” were people on television or the movies. We could imagine that these celebrities, with access to more resources than us, are bound to look exceptional. It was less natural to compare ourselves to them. But with the increasing use of social media usage, we get to see seemingly typical people “appear” to have a perfect body shape and perfect skin. This affects the self esteem of people. This effect also increased during the pandemic because many people started posting images and videos of their exciting daily lives on social media. Some people posted images of the new food recipes they try each day. Some people posted images of doing home workouts and how they enjoy their lives. During the pandemic, many people struggled with worrying about how to survive, how to earn money and how to stay safe. But seeing those social media posts of how others living their best lives during the same pandemic made people more stressed. This can have a negative impact on mental health.
This situation needs to be addressed immediately. The increasing rate of plastic surgeries and the number of people being stressed because of low self-esteem shows us the danger of the situation. Awareness programs can be the most appropriate solution for this issue. Since young people use social media more than adults, schools such as higher education institutions should organize awareness programs on the negative impact of social media. Another way is including this information to popular tv series. Today, watching television series on platforms like Netflix and Hulu has become a major part of life. If we can use such a platform to reach people and make them aware of this, it can be productive and successful. Doctors should also be encouraged to talk about improving self-esteem to youth and adults those who seek cosmetic surgeries to get their Instagram look in real life.
Trying to be more beautiful or trying to be healthier is not a bad thing. But trying to be like someone else is not a healthy thing to do. We need to understand that, and we should learn to use social media in a way that it does not affect our mental health.
References
Lyles, A. & Writer, S. (2019, June 29). Social Media Opening Youth Up to Cosmetic Surgery? — Platforms incentivize "largely unhealthy behaviors". In MEDPAGETODAY. Retrieved from https://www.medpagetoday.com/surgery/plasticsurgery/80779
Taylor, B. & DeBakey, M. E. (2021, September 22). What’s behind the increase in plastic and cosmetic surgery? In Baylor College of Medicine. Retrieved from https://blogs.bcm.edu/2021/09/22/whats-behind-the-increase-in-plastic-and-cosmetic-surgery/
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/