By Brandon Tomlinson, PhD, LPCC, NCC
Social media features prominently in life today. Its ubiquity is a notable feature of everyday life for many millions of Americans. In 2021, Pew Research estimated that 72% of U.S. adults use social media; that figure rises to 84% among adults in the 18-29 age cohort. While the connective power of social media has been hailed by its progenitors, the darker aspects of its presence in the lives of people around the country are gradually growing more difficult to ignore. Disinformation campaigns abetted by social media companies’ fealty to financial incentives have led to more political rancor and divisiveness than any time in the United States outside of the Civil War. Furthermore, in an arena quite germane to the counseling field, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has noted that social media has burdened with significant detriment the mental health of its youngest consumers; Dr. Murthy referred to this as one of the greatest health crises of our time.
One might be asking: what can a mental health professional do about this widespread issue? Well, the interventional options are numerous and scaled: they come at the individual, community, and systemic levels. At the individual level, mental health professionals need to be cognizant of the impact of social media on their clientele. Anecdotally, the number of clients with which I worked as a counselor whose issues were either precipitated or aggravated by incidents on social media caused consistent worry about their usage. However, the level to which it was ingratiated into daily life made it nearly impossible to excise fully. We must acknowledge this unfortunate reality while educating clients on the nature of social media and how it foils genuine human connection and how it has been designed by greedy companies to create addiction-like patterns of use.
On the community level, we as mental health professionals can utilize our status as authorities on mental health to provide education to our communities about the perils of excess social media use, its effects on relationships, and its role in causing mental health issues. Serving those around us can create the building blocks for healthier interpersonal interaction. Conducting workshops, trainings, or other community interventions in publicly available settings (churches, libraries, schools, etc.) is a potent and underutilized tool.
Finally, at the systemic level, individual mental health professionals may feel powerless in the face of macroscopic movements, but this is when organizational membership, volunteerism, and interfacing with government representatives serve as an outlet for impact. Joining with other professionals in advocacy and connecting with elected officials in positions of power can help to enact a wider agenda of protection against the dangers of social media.
© 2024 Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine