We live in a world now where people are addicted to the world outside of them. People are addicted to social media platforms to the point where they don't know how to respond to the world around them. People are addicted to the point where they can't depend on themselves. They depend on facebook and twitter to organize their lives. They depend on social media to control their lives and maintain their sanity. People have built their entire lives on top of this social media platform and now there has become this high dependency for it.
There is this strong desire to always wanting to know. People always want to know what is going on with who, when ,and where. People are so caught up in the media world that they forget about their existence in the actual world. It is as if they are living a digital life. The question that comes up is, is social media dependency a mental health issue?
In moderation social media is a great tool for communication and connecting with others, but for usage wise, how far is too far? Too far is when a person begins having mental, or I should say, social withdrawals when they are not active on social media for an extended period of time. However long that extended period of time may be, five minutes or five hours, it doesn't matter. Once the person begins to feel as if they are "losing their mind" because they haven't been on social media, is when there is a problem. That is when the use of it has gone too far.
Mentally a withdrawal occurs when a person stops or reduces the intake of a drug. Am I saying that social media is a drug? The answer to that is up to you and how you feel about it. There are social media and technology junkies. People are suffering withdrawals like drug addicts from not being active in the social media world.
A social media addiction is seen as a covered up mental health issue. Taken from The Telegraph, a volunteer said “I’ve felt alone and cut off from the world. My fingers seem to be programmed to seek out the Facebook app every time I pick up my phone.” It has been said by Computerworld that "social networking is engineered to be as habit-forming as crack cocaine."
There are high risks of a social media addiction. Trying to "take a break" or "quit" social media will give you nearly the same effects of quitting an SSRI cold turkey.
People need to see and understand that there is more to life than what's seen and goes on, on social media. People need to come to terms with their mental health and their usage of social media.
