Sad emoji: How social media affects mental health

Eight hours per day. A full workday. A flight from Indianapolis to London. That’s the average time kids between the ages of eight and 18 spend in front of a screen, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Five of those hours are spent on social media, according to the American Psychological Association. The discussion of how much time children and teenagers have been spending on social media has sparked questions about the negative consequences this time can have on their mental health. Kayela Miller, a psychology student at Ivy Tech, is part of the generation raised on social media. Social media has played a role in her psychology studies and has changed the way she views time spent on it. “Social media has impacted society gravely,” Miller said. The APA cites that 41% of the group of teens with the highest average social media time per day also rated their mental health as poor or very poor. This is in comparison with the 23% of teens with the lowest use of social media. As of 2024, Priori Data reports that there are 5.16 billion active social media users, nearly 60% of the global population. Facebook is the most popular, followed...