
Facebook use linked to depressive symptoms - alexcasalboni
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150406144600.htm
======
thewarrior
As someone fighting depression , I think it's the other way around.

When I'm depressed and completely out of energy , I try and find something low
effort just to shut out the negativity.

Most of the time that's scrolling through the newsfeed or aimlessly browsing
porn. If Facebook didn't exist I might find something else. Facebook is the
goto place to zone yourself out.

It's only a problem when life is so barren that likes on your FB post become
the highlight of your day. As long as you have healthy relationships and
meaningful activities it will never become a problem.

Through years of A/B testing they've trained us like rats to scroll through
the newsfeed. Sometimes I'll find myself or someone else simply scrolling
aimlessly , not even knowing why , just a tired brain looking for the next
dopamine hit. Finally, I installed an extension that removes the newsfeed on
my work computer and there's already a big improvement. I never thought such a
stupid hack could make a difference , since I could always override it.

But turns out that your brain is lazy and stupid , which you can use to your
advantage by making wasteful activities just a wee bit more difficult. Making
new habits is easiest when you rearrange your environment.

Want to become fit. Try moving into an apartment with a cross fit freak and
watch yourself change automatically.

Want to become a better developer. Get a better job on a team that uses best
practices and watch yourself strive to keep up.

Ofcourse , out of all of this self improvement thinking comes the sort of
existential angst that is caused by browsing FB,HN and Reddit and seeing how
your life is just 1 % of what it could be and what your friends are having.
This I think is separate and isn't restricted to Facebook. This has always and
will continue to exist.

So yeah sometimes you just can't win :D .

These days everytime I feel depressed I have some chocolate. And also go for a
vigorous walk. It sort of works but not nearly as well as it should ;) .

~~~
plongeur
> As long as you have healthy relationships and meaningful activities it will
> never become a problem.

If someone subjectively perceives this statement to be true about her/his life
- then s/he is not suffering from depression - pretty much by definition.

~~~
fsloth
No, one could have a lucid view of ones condition, recognize that the above is
true and still suffer from depression. That's the problem. Depression is a
medical condition that can't be just reasoned away. Person can identify that
by several rational measures they have a great life and still suffer from
depression.

~~~
pfortuny
Yes, perception is not knowledge. I found this out after a long while and is a
great help. Not perceptively but existentially.

------
mbrock
I'm pretty skeptical about the explanatory value of the "highlights reel"
theory. Anecdotally, most of what I see on Facebook is people sharing links to
stuff, liking posts by public pages, saying happy birthday, and so on.

Couldn't it just be that, uh, Facebook is kinda boring? Or, as the article
mentions, that "depressed feelings and lots of time on Facebook [...] go hand
in hand," in other words, lonely/isolated people habitually look for
connection on social media, but the kinds of communication that happen there
are not very interesting or loneliness-assuaging.

David Foster Wallace's 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram" describes a similar
tendency but with television as the substituting technology:

"Every lonely human I know watches way more than the average U.S. six hours a
day. The lonely, like the fictional, love one-way watching. For lonely people
are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odor or
obnoxiousness—in fact there exist today social and support groups for persons
with precisely these features. Lonely people tend rather to be lonely because
they decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other
humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. Let's
call the average U.S. lonely person Joe Briefcase. Joe Briefcase just loathes
the strain of the self-consciousness which so oddly seems to appear only when
other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae
abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear to watchers. He sits out the
stressful U.S. game of appearance poker.

"But lonely people, home, alone, still crave sights and scenes. Hence
television. Joe can stare at Them, on the screen; They remain blind to Joe.
It's almost like voyeurism."

~~~
scribu
> Joe Briefcase just loathes the strain of the self-consciousness which so
> oddly seems to appear only when other real human beings are around, staring,
> their human sense-antennae abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear to
> watchers.

That's called social anxiety, just FYI.

And yeah, it's plausible that people which have social anxiety are more prone
to overusing social media etc.

~~~
cheatsheet
I've had severe social anxiety for the bulk of my life. I've gone through
periods of replacing it with a fundamentally dissociative awareness. The best
I can describe it is being fully submerged in the belief that life is a dream,
and nothing that happens actually matters.

It's tough, but what actually works for me now, is giving other people the
respect and privacy they need, by not thinking about how they think. You'd be
surprised how much extra thinking time you have for everything else just by
cutting your thoughts off at that line.

Still, there are no rules yet for empathy, and my mind can still get panicky
in crowds, and there is the belief that I will be perpetually socially naive
and subject to social manipulation. But I think it's better than hiding in the
corner of a room, staring at the floor, maybe.

I do not really like social media. I like interesting conversations that
stimulate me intellectually.

~~~
walterbell
On busy sidewalks with many people moving rapidly in both directions, how are
collisions avoided? If two people each attempt to intuit the other's
trajectory while maintaining eye contact, a game of infinitely recursing
mirrors ensues, _Inception_ -style.

What works is to pick a path, any path, and look in the direction of that
path. That is a sufficient signal for all parties to self-organize and avoid
collision, even at high speeds and density of people. In other words, leading
lowers the cost of following.

Even if one could mind-read, one may not like what one perceives. But humans
are adaptable and can often reciprocate. If one's actions assume/imply
positive intent, one can motivate positive reciprocity _and_ reduce/avoid the
cost of perceiving intent.

~~~
cheatsheet
I think your path selecting algorithm can wind up in a state of deadlock, but
it is very clever in a socially passive assertive way. There has to be a way
of handling paths crossing simultaneously, non-aggressively, and this can not
be resolved without additional signaling semantics.

I like my desk and being socially awkward.

------
nicpottier
I pretty much quit Facebook about 9 months ago[1], and I do feel happier for
it.

I've had a lot of conversations about Facebook, because I think the phenomenon
there is really interesting. A few things for me:

\- I find it makes me think poorly of some of my best friends. The "humble
brag" is kind of non-stop and in so many cases I know it isn't a real
reflection of how those people feel. Yet sharing your amazing life is the
"Facebook way" and is hard to escape.

\- Crazy enough, because I am lucky enough to live a pretty great life, I
would often get feelings of envy or dissatisfaction from browsing it. This may
be a personal failing of mine, but when comparing the best moments of my
"closest" 500 friends, sometimes I come up short and for whatever reason I
find it hard to separate that.

I do really enjoy the ability to connect with old friends on Facebook and for
that I love it, but ya, for me at least, I'm happier using it only when I need
to reach out to those friends.

[1] I do still have an account and perhaps browse a few minutes once a week,
but that's coming from usually looking at it several times a day.

~~~
danudey
My Facebook account usage consists of:

1\. Clicking the occasional link from my best friend (one of the only people
who posts interesting things)

2\. Being invited to events and looking up the address

3\. Posting cat/baby pictures from Instagram

And, of course, Facebook Messenger (the only reliable, functional cross-
platform messaging system I've found)

~~~
eru
Have you tried WhatsApp? How do they compare?

~~~
colinramsay
As with all messaging systems it doesn't really matter whether they're good or
bad, it depends on who is using them. The "issue" with Facebook is that their
Messenger can't be detached from Facebook, Timeline and all. They'd see that
as a feature and not a bug.

~~~
jeorgun
Except with their mobile apps, where they separated Messenger from the main
Facebook app, and everybody threw an enormous fit for reasons I'm still not
really clear on.

(well, it's not really a clean separation since you still need a Facebook
account and all that entails, but I still don't see how separating the two
apps is anything other than a good thing)

~~~
tracker1
For me it was one more application that's constantly pinging my location has
access to all my data, and is actively feeding it upstream. Though I did keep
hangouts (google voice and sms integrations), after facebook messenger and
seeing my battery not make it through a full day (morning until I plug in at
night), I removed pretty much all the social apps from my phone.

When I looked at my battery usage stats, the top offenders were facebook and
the like, despite not even being used for days at a time. Now I use facebook
through the mobile-web interface, and haven't looked back. The only apps I
regularly use on my phone are the browser, mail, maps and hangouts. I don't
have many others even installed (lastpass, authy), and my phone now makes it a
full 24hrs+ before power goes off. (just got a new phone yesterday, so that
profile may be different now).

My fit wasn't separating messenger out... it was having another app soaking up
cpu/battery usage.

~~~
tdkl
Sadly FB app suite is really crap on Android. Not that much on iOS though,
since you can disable the access and background refresh.

------
spiritplumber
I get depressed reading HN because a lot of the stories are about people my
age who are making a lot more money than me.

Then I tell myself that they probably haven't saved as many lives as I have.

Then I have to tell myself that this doesn't pay the bills, dammit.

HN/slashdot/FB in moderation, kids! Now you know and knowing is half the
battle.

~~~
danieldk
_I get depressed reading HN because a lot of the stories are about people my
age who are making a lot more money than me._

I don't care too much about money. For me it's been more difficult to cope
with the fact that there are so many people who are far more clever than I am.
What's one's purpose if so many people can do it better?

(Before I sound too depressed: I am a happy person, I have come to appreciate
that enjoying the craft you do is the most important thing. After family and
friends.)

Regardless, I think that there is a large qualitative difference between e.g.
Hackernews and Facebook. On Facebook people brag about their fortune (or bad
luck), on Hackernews there are many genuinely interesting technical
discussions where one can learn a lot.

~~~
coldtea
> _I don 't care too much about money. For me it's been more difficult to cope
> with the fact that there are so many people who are far more clever than I
> am. What's one's purpose if so many people can do it better?_

Who said man's purpose is to "do" things?

Life's purpose is to just be here, have fun, be kind to others, and read a
good book from time to time. And raise some kids if you want to see humanity
continue onwards.

Anything else is like saying that all these people who did just that and
didn't cure cancer or sold their startup for 10B are not worthy humans.

~~~
dasboth
This is one of those truths that I know is true, but forget from time to time.

------
nullc
Well, duh, [http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2014/07/03...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2014/07/03/sheryl-sandberg-not-sorry-for-facebook-mood-manipulation-
study/)

More seriously, depression is linked to compulsive purchases.

Now I'm not saying that they're intentionally adopting features and styles
that depress their users, but should they stumble into one by chance fixing
will hurt revenues. What outcome should we expect?

Fear powerful optimization processes. Harm to mankind from inhuman
intelligences doesn't require fancy AI: in the halls of the corporate Chinese
room surprising behavior can arise just as well from complexity systems which
are ultimately made of meat.

~~~
1337biz
* depression is linked to compulsive purchases.*

Do you have by any chance a source/study for that? Would love to read up on
that issue a bit more.

~~~
nullc
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9164428](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9164428)

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/%28SICI%291520-67...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/%28SICI%291520-6793%28199612%2913:8%3C803::AID-
MAR6%3E3.0.CO;2-J/abstract)

------
dang
"Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside."

~~~
NoGravitas
"Compare the best of how they look to the worst of how you are; you won't
win." ~ Morrissey

------
shubb
Totally unsurprised -

Unhealthy levels of facebook use, particularly apparent addiction to those
annoying invite games are pretty obviously not the behavior of a happy person.
When ever I get a slew of invites to Candy Crush or similar, it's always from
someone a bit tragic.

I mean, who else has the time to sit at home playing Facebook games, but the
lack of motivation to go and do something more worthwhile?

~~~
pizza234
I agree with the first statement, but this:

> I mean, who else has the time to sit at home playing Facebook games, but the
> lack of motivation to go and do something more worthwhile?

Is a bit more complicated. On a broader perspective, this pattern usage of
Facebook is entertainment exactly like watching TV is (you even get the ads!).

Considering that, based on the first statistic I've found on Google [0], the
average American spends hours every day in front of a TV (even if not 5, 3/4
would be alarming), then there is a social problem, more than an individual
one.

~~~
VLM
Averages mean something on a well defined graph, like a bell curve, especially
with some extra numbers like std deviation.

I find it nearly impossible to find a percentile graph of something like hours
viewed along Y-axis and percentile population along the X. An excellent
startup idea would be the very hard task of a search engine that can find
graphs of a given X vs Y.

Anyway, based on what little I can find, TV watching is absolutely not a bell
curve as "young people" average only 2 or so hours per day and the elderly
average over a working day per day (in excess of 8 hours per day of TV over 60
years old).

My strong suspicion is TV viewership is strongly exponential vs percentile
with "people in trouble" (medical problems, hospital patients, severely
handicapped, addicts, prisoners) recording 24 hours/day or at least all 18 or
so waking hours as viewing time, vs the majority the population in a declining
exponential graph dropping to almost zero.

Given a population distribution like that, an average is fairly meaningless
when trying to draw cultural conclusions. Its like using average income or
average wealth to draw economic conclusions. Or doing ergonomic design based
on the average number of heads being well above one (think of Siamese twins).
What cultural conclusions can you make about my typical normal lifestyle based
on the average number of space qualified astronauts in my country?

It is not a completely useless statistic, if the average TV draws a kilowatt
then given a billion random people the electrical load due to TVs would be
about 5 billion kilowatt-hours per day (5 TWh?). But the usefulness of the
numbers break down when zoomed in.

------
tragomaskhalos
Am married to someone who is by any reasonable definition addicted to
Facebook, and this reinforces what my gut has been telling me for some time.

Part of the practical problem seems to be the compulsion to read everything
that's on your feed; I myself have felt the siren call of this, but it becomes
easier to break once you realise that you are not seeing everything from all
of your 'friends' anyway, it's all algorithmically curated and filtered.

~~~
TheBeardKing
I'm in the same boat, to the point where she asked me to password restrict her
being able to install the facebook app. She'll still access it through the web
interface, she says to make it more difficult to access.

She's the introverted type, socially anxious, and I can understand the draw of
being able to look into others lives without having to actually interact with
them. The problem, then, is just as the study describes. Face to face
conversations give a better glimpse on what's really going on personally, the
good and the bad, while the newsfeed is a stream of bragging or things to be
judgmental about.

Top news is the feature of facebook I appreciate most. I would go crazy if I
were only inundated with the stream of menial crap you see in real time.
Facebook learns who I actually interact with and knows my family members, and
shows me the "upvoted" stories so that when I get on facebook once daily for
3-5 mins, I'm caught up.

------
FollowSteph3
It's not just the highlights reel, but rather the aggregate. So for example if
you have say 52 friends (52 weeks in a year to put emphasis on the point) then
the odds are that on any given week someone is on a trip. In other words it
looks like all your friends are travelling all the time but it's not true, it
just feels that way.

Now if you increase your friends to 100, 200, 500, or more than this
perception is even worse!! You'll be seeing multiple friends travelling each
week. And on the holidays it will be even worse. However individually each
friend is about the same on average.

To make things even more skewed you will probably have a few friends that will
indeed have a better highlight reel, and possibly a better life, so of course
you'll compare yourself to them more than your average friends cause that's
how humans work. And God forbid one is a prolific facebook poster!

Also another thing to remember is that the more a post is liked the more feeds
it showed up in. In other words really cool news will appear in a lot more
feeds and negative news dies fast. This further skews our perceptions of how
great things are.

The key is that comparing in facebook is a bad thing. The data is all skewed
and not really comparable, but we still do it because it's in our nature. The
best advice is to try and appreciate and remember this and as a result avoid
those kinds of comparisons. Well that and like everything else such as TV,
etc., limit your time to something reasonable. Oh and if you have friends that
are really just acquaintances that fall into these categories then don't be
afraid to hide their feeds ;)

------
onion2k
Spending too much time comparing yourself to other people is depressing
regardless of the media you use; someone who only reads biographies of wildly
successful people will end up just as depressed as someone who spends too much
time reading the edited highlights of lives on Facebook. To that end, this
doesn't really have anything to do with Facebook. The medium is not the
message.

~~~
mbrock
More or less depressed than someone reading biographies of people in poverty
and distress? Are people happier when their Facebook feeds contain more
complaining? I'd guess that the "envy" effect is pretty marginal. "High levels
of Facebook use" sounds to me about the same as "high levels of nail biting"
or "high levels of watching cable TV." It's bored, nervous, pseudo-
socializing, fruitless activity.

~~~
spacemanmatt
Can't strictly agree to pseudo-socializing or fruitless.

Online conversations have continued offline. Those were actual people I was
talking to. Those conversations resume online, often enough. It's part of the
fabric.

An invitation to an actual event with actual people received on facebook,
because of activity or exposure there, is not fruitless activity.

But it is usually a bored, nervous activity. I can handily agree to that part.

~~~
mbrock
Yeah, I'm not trying to say it's _all_ like that.

------
collyw
For me it works the other way. If I have something interesting and creative to
work on, forget Facebook I'll get absorbed in my work. If I am back to fixing
the same dumb errors in users excel spreadsheets, then I get kind of pissed
off (having complained to management that it is a crap solution to the problem
many times). I become unenthusiastic and end up checking Facebook a lot more
regularly.

------
weisser
I think most people realize this anecdotally but the switching costs are too
high for many to remove themselves.

Personally, I have many connections exclusively only on FB - I don't have
their emails, phone numbers, etc - that I remain on FB only to be able to
message them.

I wish I could automatically message them and easily collect their email/phone
#s with minimal effort...probably a way but I haven't looked into it.

~~~
ZenoArrow
"I wish I could automatically message them and easily collect their
email/phone #s with minimal effort...probably a way but I haven't looked into
it."

Have you considered asking for their email address? Could send them a private
message on Facebook saying you're considering leaving Facebook but would still
like to keep in touch. I imagine most people would be fine with sharing their
email address if they've already linked up with you on Facebook.

------
cbr
Looking at the details [1], it seems to be a small (N=180, then N=152)
correlational study. How can we tell whether the effect is causal?

One way would be to run a randomized controlled trial, where you show some
people slightly happier or sadder Facebook streams and you see how they react.
This experiment has, in fact been run, [2] and what they found was that seeing
happy status updates seemed to make people happier, not sadder. [3]

[1]
[http://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/jscp.2014.33.8.7...](http://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/jscp.2014.33.8.701)

[2]
[http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full)

[3] Though what they actually measured was what people posted, not their
happiness. Perhaps seeing happy things leads you to be sad but post happy
things to fit in.

------
loceng
I just want to know how many (hopefully not any?) additional suicides occurred
with the experiment Facebook did with their unethical research to either show
more positive or more negative posts in people's newsfeeds; I can't remember
the specific experiment but that is the gist of it.

------
NietTim
One thing that has always stuck with me is the phrase "Facebook is only a
collection of the highlights in someones life". Most people only post the
positive stuff about their lives to facebook, which makes their lives look way
more awesome then they probably are.

~~~
TheBeardKing
Is it the highlights of their life? Or is it 80% politically biased news
stories, pinterest desires, funny videos and pictures, complaints about random
encounters with people, and lots of "This"ing?

------
coldcode
With 1.3 billion subs, I assume Facebook use is linked to everything from
winning Nobel prizes to terrorism.

------
guard-of-terra
What's if it's the other way around? People prone to depression hanging on
social media more.

~~~
jon-wood
This sounds far more likely to me. If I'm having a crap time and have no
energy I'm far more likely to passively consume Facebook than I am to actually
leave the house and see somebody.

------
TuxMulder
I think it's quite easy to neglect your own highlights reel and forget the
good things you have going on in your own life. Made even more difficult if
you don't actually post to facebook. Ultimately though, everyone's life has
ups and downs; people tend to cherry pick the ups when posting to facebook,
which is certainly worth remembering if you spend long periods of time on
there obsessing over how much better other peoples' lives seem to be.

------
JohnBooty
My Facebook "happy place" involves using it like a glorified email system.

In other words, it's "a tool I use to contact people" and not "a place where I
hang out."

I do _not_ allow Facebook's various apps and operating system hooks to notify
me _ever_ unless I am directly messaged by somebody. Used this way, I find it
really valuable and not distracting. There are tons of people I'd never be
able to effectively keep in touch with without it.

I also unfollow all of my negative FB friends. This is FB's most underrated
feature. Instead of _unfriending_ a person and dealing with the possible
fallout, you can quietly unfollow them so that they don't show up on your
feed. You can still contact each other, and they don't know they've been
unfollowed.

I'll always keep in touch with my closest friends, even if they move to a
shack in the desert and I have to rent a camel to talk to them. But for the
rest of the friends and family I maintain some level of contact with[1] -
probably a hundred or so? - I don't know how I'd keep in touch with them
anyway.

______________

[1] The threshold would probably be, "would I care if they got a new pet or
not?"

------
harmonicon
Quitting Facebook has definitely made me more out of touch with friends who
are not in the same locale. I do miss the ability to get timely updates on
what they are up to.

On the other hand, the separation has made reunion/catching up that much more
exciting for us. When we do get together, it is always an exhilarating time,
with so much to talk about and share. Personally I think this model works just
fine for me.

------
downandout
It's more likely than not the other way around (depression causes Facebook
use). Clinical depression starts from within, and is usually independent of
one's circumstances (wealthy people with good families are often depressed
too). Depressed people have a need to rationalize their feelings. "My life
isn't as good as others" is a common rationalization for depression, and a
service that lets them view the highlight reels of a billion other people
whose lives appear to be better than theirs is the ultimate tool for it.

------
sparaker
Stalking often could make you feel depressed. But facebook in my case helped
me meet with very old friends without any effort so thats a plus.

------
rohunati
My biggest problem is I have so many services linked to Facebook, so if I
delete Facebook, I delete the other services as well (Spotify, and every other
website where I lazily clicked "Sign up with Facebook").

~~~
schmichael
Just turn off notifications from it and don't visit it. The problem isn't with
having an account; the problem is with overuse.

------
brymaster
Some previous discussion on the same topic:

"Facebook Is Making Us Miserable"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3335947](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3335947)

------
PaulHoule
I can definitely say I see more acute distress about things that happen on
Facebook than I see on any other site. It seems someone I know is upset about
some interaction they had with somebody every few days.

------
alenmilk
Social comparison is an old problem. Facebook is effective at spreading
information thus amplifying the problem for those susceptible.

------
VieElm
Is there some way to opt out of these studies on Facebook? I don't use these
services to be studied.

------
ksinggao
hahahahaha this is exactly one of the reason why Twitter was getting
populated. You can just twit or comment on things , and barely show off your
own life, or making less comparison with others (well expect competing for
gaining more followers). LOL

------
fatjokes
Exactly why I quit FB. I'm definitely happier now.

------
enupten
Indeed, \max \\{X_i\\} has a very skewed distribution.

