Likes, followers, and views three things taking over the minds of the average American teen. Media, in general, has a positive motive and has given us the ability to do everything from seeing the first moon landing to kicking a president out of the White House but as devices and social media have developed so have issues associated with mental health. The original purpose of social media was to create a more comprehensive set marketing platform for brands and business, not a place for people to involve their lives around or to make themselves look good. But when did these issues truly begin?

In 1997 a new social media site called Six Degrees was created. It enabled users to upload a profile and become friends with other users, and continued its popularity until it was shut down in 2001. Since then we’ve gone from Friendster to MySpace to LinkedIn to Facebook, Instagram, snapchat, twitter and so many more. But what effect do these sights create mentally?

Studies show that the average American spends over nine hours a day on their phones and that number only goes up for teens. In our lifetimes most of us will have spent five years and four months, 1,984 days, or 47,616 hours on social media while that number continues to grow. But what does that mean for us as teens? In 2018 statistics showed that over 5.4% of Americans ages 12-18 suffer from a diagnosed eating disorder making over two million adolescents with issues often inspired by images found on the internet or peer pressure. Studies show using social media gives an increased chance of more than 2.7 times to develop depression. In 2015 the NY Post reported that 36 percent of all teens using social media expressed feeling desperately sad or hopeless, thinking about, planning or attempting suicide. Since 2007 the rate of teen depression and death have gone up drastically. The research found that teens who spend five or more hours per day on their devices are 71 percent more likely to have one risk factor for suicide regardless of the content.     

The question becomes, would people act the same if they didn’t have the opportunity to show off on social media? It doesn’t seem to matter what you post, everything on the internet has a chance of receiving hate, whether it’s a picture of a person or an image of a puppy, trolls, and people on the internet seem to have control. With teenagers today, it doesn’t seem to matter how many nice comments they receive it's often the few negative that take more of an impact. Clay Shrinky once said, “Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it,” and that is the truth.
  

 But what are these things or reasons causing American Teens to become depressed or even to take their own life?  Every 100 minutes a teenager commits suicide making it the third-leading cause of death for young people ages 15 to 24. 20 percent of all teens experience depression, and only 30 percent of those are being treated for it.

The real issue becomes that this is merely another risk factor of social media. The teenage brain is one that is one that is not fully developed, and our attention span is one that can change at any second. We focus on things supposedly of importance and then almost completely forget about it, but what does science say about it? The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain where all rational decisions are made. Neurons within it communicate with other regions of the brain through synapses, playing a role in weighing choices, controlling emotional responses, impulses and making judgments. Functional MRI studies of teenage brains show increased activation in the visual cortex when viewing a photo with a significant amount of likes versus the picture with only a few. It suggests that our brains intuitively pay more attention to something that has been arbitrarily rated better socially, regardless of the content.

Today most teens have had a variety of harmful exposure and responses to social media. But they’re also more likely to say that social media has a positive, rather than a negative, effect on them. In a sense it’s almost hypocritical considering so many main news channels, websites and apps are displaying the side effects of the use of social media when the original goal was to get people to use it.

The message of this article isn’t to diss the use of social media platforms in any way, it is to make others aware of the fact words hurt and that anything, whether posted, sent, liked, or shared, will always continue to be on the internet. So, when in doubt, leave it out.