Social Networks and Mental Health

of reasons. I mean, for one thing, just to be transparent with all of y'all, I'm a gen xer, okay. I grew up in an era in which there was a pretty darn hefty stigma attached to all things mental health, Like if you had mental health struggles, the feeling was that somehow that was your fault and a failing of

you personally. So to this day, while I recognize the importance of mental health and seeking help when you're struggling, like when a friend of mine tells me, oh, I found this awesome therapist, I'm so happy for them, it's

still a barrier for me, which is screwed up. Like rationally, I can recognize it as being important, and I can be happy for my friends to seek that health and yet I still have the blocks, the mental blocks that are rock solid when it comes to my own mental health, which kind of stinks, Like it really stinks when you are trying to think of things rationally and you still encounter this because you're like, Okay, some things go beyond rationality.

I have to admit that. But apart from my own personal reasons, it's a tricky topic because it's really hard to be definitive about things that relate to mental health. There are all different types of human beings out there in the world, and there's stuff that could roll right off the back of one person but really traumatically impact someone else, and it often can be really different, dificult

to determine a causal relationship between different factors. Now by that, I mean there are a ton of studies out there that have looked into the potential impact of social media on mental health. For example, a study might find that people who identify as being depressed or experiencing anxiety might be spending a lot more time on social media sites

than people who do not identify as that. But does that mean the social media sites are causing this anxiety and depression that by staying on these sites that's what's making people feel anxious and depressed. Or could it mean that people who are already experiencing anxiety and depression are seeking out social media sites. You know, maybe that's a coping mechanism for them. In other words, it's the old

phrase correlation is not causation. Just because two things appear to happen together doesn't mean that one caused the other. They could be unrelated. They could both be caused by the same common factor. We just don't know without looking into it further. So today I thought, you know what, I'm going to actually go through one of these studies. Because I've talked about studies in general, but typically I'm reading about an article that's written about the study. I'm

not reading the study itself. So I found a study from twenty twenty that was a sort of meta analysis on the subject of mental health and social networking sites. Now, if you are unfamiliar with the term meta analysis, that is a type of study that looks at the results of other studies in order to reach some conclusion. So you might say, all right, let's take these thirty studies about this one topic. Really look at what the conclusions are of all of them and see if we can

use that to draw new conclusions. So in this case, the researchers of this particular study, they identified fifty papers about social media and mental health using Google scholar. By the way, when they did the search terms for things like mental health and social media and social networking, they came up with tens of thousands of papers. Even with social media and mental health together, it was like eighteen

thousand papers. From that group, they got fifty, and from that list of fifty, they paired the list down to sixteen studies. They had a whole process for reviewing these papers and determining whether or not they fit within their own study. And as you can see, with sixteen, that means fewer than half of those fifty made it through. Eight. Of those studies that they'd considered. They were cross sectional studies.

That means it's a study where they analyzed data, or the original researchers analyzed data from a group of subjects at a single point in time, so it's like a cross section of time. That made up half of the papers that they were looking at. Two of the sixteen were qualitative STUF studies. That means they were looking at non quantifiable information and trying conclusions from that. So, in other words, these studies look at stuff like social phenomena,

which you cannot really measure with scientific units. Right, if you're measuring, like in chemistry, you're using units of like weight and volume, those are quantifiable. You can put actual units of measurement to them. If you're saying how happy is society, that's not really quantifiable. That's qualitative, not quantifiable. So those were the kinds of studies for two of

the sixteen papers that they chose. It's tricky to do a qualitative analysis because you're still trying to come to a scientific conclusion, but you're using unquantifiable factors to do so. So they get a little whibbly wobbly, and a lot of this stuff falls into fields like sociology, which, by the way, I love sociology is one of my favorite classes when I was in college. But sociology is by its nature difficult to grow because of a lack of

quantifiable units. Anyway, three of the remaining studies were longitudinal studies. That means they explored the same list of variables and how those variables changed over a long period of time. So this is like if you have a group of subjects and you are observing them periodically over a long course like potentially years. The remaining studies were systematic, meaning they looked at patterns that would indicate cause and effect.

Are there recognizable and reliable patterns so much so that should you start to see one thing, you would immediately begin to draw conclusions that a pattern exists, even if it's not readily evident at the time. One of the really big challenges of meta analyses is that you have to try and synthesize the findings of different studies that are all using totally different methodologies, and you do this

while you're trying to draw your own conclusions. That's pretty tough because you might accidentally misinterpret findings in an effort to reach the conclusion you've already made. Or you might pair two different papers together to say these papers support one another, but because they're different methodologies, it may not

be as clear as that. Right. If the methods were totally different, then yeah, the conclusions might be similar, but you might not be able to say this study supports this other study because they they took such different pathways to get there. You can't be sure that they are actually saying the same thing, and there's bias that you have to deal with. Everybody has bias, and suppressing bias is important. It's also really hard to do. Sometimes it's impossible.

You likely are going to have your own bias when you go into a study, like you might already have a preconceived idea of something that you're just expecting to prove. So that will make you pay more attention to the things that really reinforce your bias and potentially dismiss or discount things that are not aligned with your bias unless it gets to a point where it's just overwhelmingly impossible

to ignore. So this gets into things like cherry picking, right where you're cherry picking the points of data that support your perspective or your argument. Now, I'm not saying that all meta analyzes are bad. I'm just saying they're tricky to do and they're easy to do poorly, So they're not bad just out of the gate, but they are hard to do well. And obviously your conclusions are

only as reliable as the individual studies are. Like, you could do a fantastic meta analysis, but if all the studies that are part of your meta analysis are crap, then the results of your meta analysis aren't reliable either. Garbage in, garbage out kind of thing. So that's why

that selection process was important. So while they only use six out of fifty papers that they selected out of a larger like eighteen thousand potential papers, you can at least say, well, they had a process there to try and weed out things that would either be a bad fit or were poorly designed. So this paper, I haven't even mentioned the title yet. Here's the title. You can look this up and read it yourself. It's social Media Use and its Connection to Mental health, a systematic review.

And this was by a collection of authors. There's like six or seven authors attached to this. I found it by using the National Library of Medicine when I was looking for a paper to talk about, and it was originally published in a web based peer reviewed medical journal called Curious. Now let's cur eus. We're going to get to the paper in a second, and I'll also have more to say about Curious at the end of this episode, because, as it turns out, Curious has its own curious reputation.

I'm not saying it's a bad paper, but I am saying like it is a matter of debate among the research circle, and yeah, I kind of tripped into that one without anticipating it. So first, before we get to the actual paper, I think it is important to establish the connection between socialization in general and mental health. Human beings are social animals, even though some days I feel like I should just run off to be a hermit in the woods. Some days, y'all, that compulsion is a

strong one. So in a different scientific paper by Deborah Umberson and Jennifer carraz Montez title Social Relationships and Health a Flashpoint for Health Policy, there is a very powerful statement that I wanted to share. Quote Captors use social isolation to torture prisoners of war to drastic effect. Social isolation of otherwise healthy, well functioning individuals eventually results in

psychological and physical disintegration and even death. In quote, that is a heck of a way to argue for the power of socialization, because when we are deprived of socialization, we suffer. Generally speaking, studies show that the quantity and quality of our social relationships have an enormous impact on our well being, both mental health and physical health. People who maintain more and high quality social relationships tend to

live longer and healthier than those who do not. So, you know, for being someone who has very few friends at this point, like I don't hang out with very many people at all, I look at this and I think I need to get out there more and actually for meaningful friendships, not just be like, hey, how's it going, what's your sign? Nice to see you come here. Often like to actually get meaningful relationships because they are very important to our health. So there is strong evidence supporting

a link between socialization in general and mental health. There's lots of research that says that it's an important factor for our mental health. Is this aspect of socialization not that people who are kind of loaners or whatever are mentally unwell, that's not necessarily the case. But generally speaking, we tend, we humans tend to do better when we have good socialization. Now let's move on to social networks. Now.

I'm sure some of y'all out there are old enough like me to remember a time before there were really online social networks, or at least a time before we had sites that served purely as a social network. I think back to the bulletin Board System or BBS days and I can remember logging into a service and skimming the message boards, and these BBSs often existed on a single person's computer somewhere. So this wasn't the Internet. You weren't logging into a network of networks. You were literally

dialing into a computer that hosted this bulletin board. Now that computer might link to other computers and share a message board between them, which increased the reach of the bulletin board system, but it still wasn't the Internet yet, not for the average person, but for a lot of folks, it was a preview of what the Internet would be. It was just on a much smaller scale, kind of think of like a community bulletin board version of the Internet.

And back in those days, a lot of folks, myself included, thought, Wow, this technology is going to transform the world. We're going to be able to communicate with each other instantly, no matter where in the world we happen to be. We'll be able to find people who share our interests and make friends in brand new ways. It is going to be amazing. In fact, I'm going to tell you another story to sort of illustrate this Before I get to that. However,

let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, so before the ad break, I promised y'all a story. So when I was a kid, I loved fantasy novel I mean I still do, but I don't read them as much as I used to because I read a lot of other stuff now. But when I was a kid, I wasn't really into science fiction very much. I mean I liked some science fiction movies and television shows, but I didn't read science fiction books. I loved fantasy novels.

I knew precisely three other kids in my personal life who also liked fantasy novels to various degrees. So our tiny little social group of four people kind of helped us get through the experiences of like middle and high school because none of us fit in particularly well with the rest of the student body. I wouldn't say we were like ostracized or ridiculed or anything. I mean, maybe we were, but I wasn't aware of it, which is

probably for the best. But like, I just didn't integrate well with the main student body, not being so savvy with things like mainstream entertainment or sports or any of that. However, you know, there was something special about my childhood that my friends lacked, and that was that my parents write science fiction and fantasy and horror and mysteries and other types of fiction. They are published authors. My father has written more than a hundred published works at this point

in that field in fiction. And one way that my parents would promote their work it was really my dad. At this point. Mom would also write, but that was later on. Dad would go to different regional science fiction and fantasy conventions where fans would come together and they would hang out and party and have a great time for a weekend. These conventions had names like Dixie Trek, Dixie Dixie Trek, or Phoenix Con. Atlanta is known as the City of the Phoenix, or the Atlanta Fantasy Fair.

That was a really big one. So these days, the really big one in the Southeast is Dragon Con. And in fact, my dad was the first toastmaster Dragging when it first got started. And it was at these science fiction and fantasy conventions that I saw the power of community.

So in the quote unquote real world, a fantasy novel geek could end up feeling pretty darn isolated in those days, but at these conventions I would become part of an enormous community of fans, so you could go to panel discussions about your favorite book where people would talk about fan theories or discuss certain works in depth, or sometimes you might even get a chance to hear the author himself or herself speak, And everything was a celebration of

the geeky interests for the most folks attending, I mean, it was an experience you just couldn't replicate back home, because there just weren't enough people you knew in your everyday life where you could have these kinds of interactions. These conventions were special. They gave fans a place in time to really engage in their interests and to celebrate them. So early on the Internet seemed to be shaping up

in a way that it could do this, but through computers. Right, that could involve creating, you know, communities that celebrate specific interests online, and you wouldn't be restricted to just attending a convention one weekend out of the year in order to get together with friends and talk about, you know, the latest episode of Quantum Leap or whatever. Now you could go online and join a forum dedicated to your

favorite show or movie or book series or whatever. And if there wasn't one, out there, you could make one and folks would find it. Now way back in the day, I remember joining a forum called the Bronze, and it was a community that celebrated the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I ended up meeting up a bunch of other fans that way, including someone who ultimately went on to write for the series Angel, which spun off of Buffy. I met some of the musicians who provided

music for the show's soundtrack. I even ultimately ended up meeting some of the actors, writers, and directors of the series. So first I met them online and then later I

met them in person. It was great. So for a while it seemed like the Internet and the Web in particular, we're going to revolutionize the way we socialize with one another, and a lot of us who were optimists thought that we might be able to form really deep, meaningful relationships online and that would be just as important and relevant and deep and meaningful as the relationships we had out in the quote unquote real world. It ended up being

true for me. I mean, I met my partner online way back in the nineteen nineties and we're still together thirty years later. But social platforms would end up introducing a lot more than just a way to connect with other people. I don't think the optimists out there took into account the development of recommendation algorithms, for example. So the algorithm's job, when you really get on to it is to convince you to stay on the platform for as long as possible, to hold your attention as long

as it possibly can. So the algorithm is supposed to serve up material that you're going to find engaging. Now that doesn't mean good, but engaging, because it doesn't matter if the stuff you see makes you feel happy or sad, or angry or scared or any other specific emotion. That doesn't matter at all to the algorithm. What matters is that you stay there, You don't leave the page. Preferably, you engage with whatever the content is, you know, by clicking that you like it, or leaving a comment, or

perhaps best of all, sharing it with other people. That's really the algorithm's job, And the recommendation algorithm is necessary because the social networking site is a business. We're the product, right The site isn't selling anything to us, apart from some sites that offer like a premium experience in return for a subscription. Otherwise, these companies make their money through advertising. The more valuable the landscape is, the more these sites

can charge to put ads across that landscape. And if the site can assure advertisers that their ads are going to match up with appropriate audiences, thus improving the chance that folks will actually click through the ad to buy something, then they can charge even more for those ads. So again, the emotional reaction users have while they're using the service, that doesn't matter, because sad people they're worth exactly the same amount of money as happy people as long as

they're staying engaged on the site. If you are happy or sad, you're worth the same amount to Facebook. And it's easier to find stuff that makes users sad or anxious or whatever. Well, naturally, if it's easier to find that stuff, that material is going to get served up to users more frequently, and you're going to be encountering

that stuff on a more frequent basis. Now, if you contrast that with the early days of social networking sites, before they had found a way to monetize their operations, then things are drastically different. You often had sites that

used a much more straightforward approach to content organization. I still miss the old days where I could log into a site like Facebook and I could just look at my friends' posts in reverse chronological order, so all I had to do was keep scrolling, and I would eventually catch up on what everyone was doing, and I would know I had a good idea, like I've seen everything. But today, if I go to Facebook, I get a

hodgepodge of posts from the last several days. They're organized in no discernible order, and there's tons of ads peppered into boot. All right, now, let's get back to the paper. So according to the meta analysis paper that I mentioned at the top of the episode, the negative impact of social media, or the correlation between social media and the mental health problems is apparent. And then that sounds logical.

I mean, there's like a common sense element to that, right, I mean I just explained that the site is designed to keep people there as long as possible, and the way to do that is to catch and hold their attention, and negative stuff can do that fairly effectively. So it's no surprise that negative stuff rises to the top and that this can have an impact on people. But that's still a long way to go from proving there's a causal link between social networking use and mental health issues.

So the paper did share some pretty interesting findings. One of those is that a person's age didn't seem to affect the impact of social networking use, so whether you were old or young, there didn't seem to be much of a change there, although a lot of the studies would end up focusing on pre adolescent users. Gender, however, did seem to have a factor when it came to impact. Those who identified as female were, in the words of their authors, much more likely to experience a negative impact

to mental health than those who identified as male. Now, I'm not sure how much I should actually trust this paper if I'm honest, because as I was reading it early on, I found an error in the paper. It includes a bar graph that shows gender distribution among the various platforms, And so this paper came out in twenty twenty, so keep that in mind. But even so, the distribution caught me off guard because it flew in the face

of what I had believed. It doesn't mean that I was right and the paper was wrong, but it did surprise me. So the one for Twitter was the one that really surprised me. Now keep in mind, again, this paper came out in twenty twenty. Twitter was still Twitter back in those days. And if you had asked me in twenty twenty, what do you think the gender distribution

is on Twitter? I would have guessed it skewed male, that there'd be more men on Twitter than women, But in fact, it apparently was much more skewed toward females. So men made up only thirty eight percent of Twitter users according to this study. However, this is where we get to the mistake in the bar chart. So the chart says that eighty two percent of Twitter users were female in twenty twenty. Eighty two percent. Now clearly that's wrong.

Like if I told you eighty two percent of the people on Twitter in twenty twenty were women, you would automatically say no, that cannot be right. But even the chart itself proves that it's wrong because the two numbers are supposed to add up to one hundred right, eighty two percent are women, and yet it also says thirty eight percent are men. If you add those together you get one hundred and twenty percent. So my guess is the bar chart should have said sixty two percent women,

not eighty two. I was surprised to see a mistake like that make it all the way through edits into publishing, because, again, curious. The journal that published this paper is a peer reviewed journal, and typically part of peer review means checking for things like stupid mistakes, and yet this one made it all

the way through into published format. And maybe it's not fair to judge a paper purely by a single mistake, but that is such a simple, careless error, and one that's actually really easy to catch if you're just I mean, I was just casually reading this. I wasn't reading this

as an editor, and I just caught it immediately. Well, that raises concerns about the rest of the findings of the paper, right, like, if this mistake made it through, and it made it through not just the writing, but the peer review and the editing processes, and still made it through to publishing, how can I count on the findings of the rest of the paper. But let's carry on, because I had already chosen this one, so I was like, well,

let's see it through to the grizzly end. So the paper actually takes its time getting going, which I appreciate

it's kind of like me. The researchers justify their work by calling out the need for systematic reviews, essentially pointing out that social networking sites are still relatively young and that as a result, there's not much research information available that you can work from, and that their own paper stands as a resource mainly for future research like this isn't to draw firm conclusions, but rather to help serve as a sort of summary for more than a dozen

studies conducted in the area, so that people who are looking into it further are more readily able to identify.

I don't know how useful that is, honestly, because again they also pointed out that when they went through Google scholar to look for scholarly works on the subject of mental health and social networks, they found like seventeeny eighteen thousand hits and if there's that many hits, and then they selected fifty, I don't know what criteria they used just to select the initial fifty, apart from they wanted to avoid duplicates, they selected fifty and narrowed it down

to sixteen. I'm not sure that that's going to be a huge help to future researchers, so I question that particular part of the justification. But the research site in the paper is interesting and it really runs the spectrum, like they summarize what each of the papers are. They don't go into a lot of detail about the findings,

which is interesting to me. There are studies that concluded that there's no real link between social media use and mental health, which seems to be counterproductive to the point the paper was making. Others that were cited found that social media could exacerbate mental health problems, so the suggestion there was that the issues were already present and the

use of social media made them worse. Some discovered that reading posts correlated more with depression than creating posts, So it's not just using social network, but how are you using it, Like if you're just doom scrolling, that would be associated more with stuff like anxiety and depression, but if you are creating that isn't a Few of the studies focused on gender and found that people identifying as women were more prone to social media addiction than those

who identified as men. One study titled the Use of Social Media by Australian pre Adolescents and its Links with Mental Health found that young users of sites like Instagram and YouTube reported more body image issues and more eating disorders than those who did not use those sites. That was something that was really brought to light when the

Facebook whistleblower came forward a couple of years ago. And the paper goes on to explain that many, but not all, of the various studies included in their meta analysis indicated a correlation between mental health and social media use. I'll expand on that further, and then I'll talk more about Curious, the journal that this was published in. But first let's

take another quick break. Okay, we're back. So before that break, I was talking about how the various studies, most of them were indicating some form of correlation between mental health and social media use, which, again, that seems to go along with common sense. I think most people, if you ask them if they were familiar with social networks at any rate, they would probably say, yeah, I think that if you use social networks a lot, you're probably dealing

with some mental health issues, challenges like anxiety and depression. However, common sense, it's dangerous to go along with that, right, Like, everyone could have this kind of common sense still be wrong. It could be that once you look into something purely from a scientific approach, the links that were believed to

be there don't actually exist. I'm thinking of stuff like quantum mechanics, Like the world of quantum mechanics is counterintuitive because it doesn't behave along the same laws as what we experience in the classical world. Like classic physics and quantum physics seem to conflict with one another, and it can be really hard to grasp certain concepts in quantum physics because they run counter intuitive to the way we

experience the world. So their common sense would fail you if you were just to use that to guide your way. So again, like while common sense might say, yeah, mental health and excessive social networking use are dangerously linked without actually studying it, you can't say that definitively. So the authors say that a causal relationship is unsupported based on

the studies at this time. So again they're just kind of saying what I said before, which is that, yeah, there are these two different factors that appear to be correlated, but we can't definitively say one causes the other. So more studies are needed, in other words, and these studies need to be designed in order to determine if there is an actual causal relationship here, or if both mental health issues and an increase in social media use are

perhaps symptoms of something else, or maybe just a comorbidity. So, in other words, the findings say pretty much all of what I said earlier in this episode, we don't have enough information to make a determination. Let's talk about some of the problems I have with this study. For one thing, I mean, it doesn't say anything ultimately. I mean that's kind of unfair, like saying, oh, it doesn't really say anything, or it says exactly what everybody already knows, which is

that we don't know. But what the whole point of it was, it was to analyze these other studies and to see like if there were any common points that supported a more firm stance, And ultimately they found that it appears that there is a link between mental health and social networking use, but what that link is precisely is not possible to be determined at this point. Now, I also wanted to talk about Curious, the journal that

it was published in. It has I would argue a bit of a shaky reputation based upon what I have seen it is a peer reviewed journal. That is a good thing. In general, it's a good thing. Peer review is important in that if it's done correctly, then papers that have issues are less likely to be accepted and published, which means they're less likely to muddy the scholarly output

of researchers. You want good papers to get published so that we continue to build knowledge and not make things more murky by including stuff that is unsupported or poorly researched or poorly designed, whatever it may be. So you want a good, robust peer review process. However, peer review is a tricky thing to do. Even really notable papers that have really good reputations they have issues with peer review. It's tough. The peer review process over it Curious is

reportedly a very fast one. There's a quick turnaround. Now. That can be a good thing for researchers who need their work to be published. There are students who need to publish works as part of their graduate work before they can graduate with an advanced degree. I suspect that this article or this paper was such a project. It comes across to me as, oh, these were students who took a bunch of other studies and then they produce

this paper. It strikes me that way. I don't know that for sure, by the way, that's just the feeling I get as I read it. And of course, there are also positions and titles that require the holder of that position or title has to publish work at regular intervals or else risk losing their position. Like professors, there are a lot of professors at universities who are required to publish a certain number of papers per year. That's just the expectation, or else they can lose their position.

And publication takes time, like especially for scientific papers. If you're talking about scientific or medical papers, that review process could take as long as a year, and ultimately there's no guarantee that the paper is going to go through.

So if you're under the gun and you have to publish, and you really need your work to get out there in order for that to count toward you know, whether your graduation or holding your job or whatever, going through a lengthy peer review and editing process is not high on your list of priorities. So a resource that takes work and fast tracks it toward publication can be a huge help to those who need to have their work published.

But obviously the flip side of this is that if this process is a fact fasttracked, mistakes can slip through. Like I mentioned one earlier in this episode, it was clearly a mistake, and it made it all the way through the process. I actually found a few things in this paper that struck me as odd or poorly worded, Like there were bits where I thought that sentence is

missing something, the syntax doesn't quite work. I'm not entirely certain what they were trying to say, so several passages in the paper struck me as in need of editing, just for the purposes of clarity, if nothing else. And the thought occurred to me that if I had written this for HowStuffWorks dot Com and had submitted it, my editor would have returned it to me with a note that said I needed to rewrite that passage. Then again, maybe it's because I'm not a scientist. Because I'm reading

this the way an English major reads a paper. I'm not reading it the way a scientific researcher does. And that's a fair statement, right. I am not a scientific researcher, so maybe I am being unfair with this. I did some digging and found there's actually a quite a bit of disagreement about Curious in the research space as to whether it's a good resource or like you know, a

junk journal or something along those lines. So some people have pointed to it as being really helpful if you need to get your work published and seen, and that when it comes to that, it ends up being an incredible resource. Others have argued that the journal has a low rejection rate, meaning it doesn't reject a lot of articles right off the bat, and that the fast turnaround time means that as a result, they publish a lot of low quality studies, or at least lower quality studies,

And I fell down a rabbit hole. That is the mire of scientific publishing and how it puts researchers in a really tough position, and that a lot of journals end up being predatory right, like they end up looking to get researchers to spend thousands of dollars in things like the editing and peer review services, which makes me question the whole system. If I'm being honest with you now, I will say that even the critics of Curious said, no,

it's not predatory. It's not like it's one of those journals set up to builk people out of money so that they can get their work in print. They're not like that, which is good, Like I'm glad to hear that, So I don't want to cast that aspersion on Curious. It does appear to be very much legitimate in that regard. It's just that the process being so fast tracked means

that stuff that shouldn't slip through sometimes does. I have not read other papers in Curious, so I don't know how prevalent that is, but just reading this one, I thought there's some issues here. So anyway, that's why I went through this whole paper was to kind of get my head wrapped around what does the science say about this, because we often will hear things, especially in politics, that end up relating to the use of social media and

social networking sites and how that impacts people's health. And while again it seems to go along with common sense, I think it's important for us to really recognize that we need more research in this area just so that we address the issue properly. Right, if the underlying problem is not the use of social networks, then limiting people's time on social networks or policing social networks so that

they cause less harm or perceived harm. That's not going to actually solve the problem if it turns out that there's another issue that's really at play here and it just manifests both as mental health challenges and a desire to use social networks more. If you're just elimiting the social networks, then you're not really solving that common problem.

So that's why more studies are really needed now. It may very well turn out to be that the over use of social networks does in fact impact mental health in a negative way, and thus by limiting your exposure to social networks you can improve your mental health. That might be true, but without the actual studies to support that, we don't know for sure, and we're just kind of stumbling around in the dark trying to come to a solution that may or may not address the problems we have.

And there are better ways to go about doing that, and more scientific research is certainly one of those ways. Hopefully, the research that's done in the future will be done in such a way that the methodologies will be clear, they'll be replicable, so that if someone else wants to do the same study, they're going to get more or less the same sort of results. And that we can then draw firm conclusions and create real solutions from that work.

Science is tricky, I mean, ultimately it's not. Science is not tricky when you get down if you boil it down to it to its core principles, which is that you know, you're asking questions, you're designing tests to test those questions, and you're coming up with answers. That's pretty simple, but going about it ends up being a lot more work and pretty complicated. But I hope you appreciated this episode and the look into what does it actually mean

to read one of these studies? This one, I think it was almost like Baby's first study for me because against it was a meta analysis. It didn't actually dive into things like statistical analysis or anything like that. Like there were no complicated formula or anything like that that I needed to read over. I was just reading conclusions about other studies, So this was a pretty simplistic one.

But yeah, it gave me a deeper appreciation for the challenges that people in the field face when they're trying to design their studies and publish their work, which wasn't my intent when I started out in this episode, but that's where I ended up. I hope all of you out there are doing really well, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production.

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