Lauren Hyer

Instructor, Jackie Burr

English 2010

30 May 2019

Notebook #8

Reading through this article there was a lot of things that I agreed with, such as how

social media has become such a huge part of life and how most people cannot live without it.

The article that I read was “Are Screens Really Hurting Teens?” by Frye Devon. After reading

this I found that eating potatoes had a similar negative association with mental health. That’s

right, eating potatoes. It is found that there are many different people that use social media but a

lot of those people have something alike, that being that the people who have mental health

challenges lead to greater use of devices, not visa versa. This means that it really is not social

media causing the issue, the issue was already there.

This is where I do not agree, there are so many people out there that have issues and

mental health problems that are being magnified due to social media. The majority of all people

do have some type of mental health issues, it just depends on how you act with it, and how you

treat it. The amount of suicides and times people have self harmed due to social media is

unbelievable. It has been found that the people born between 1995-2012 appear to have a higher

rate of depression. Compared to earlier years there had not been much of a problem with

depression and mental illnesses. There is a reason as to why depression has dramatically

increased in these years, and that is because of the effects of social media.
 It really has been proven that social media has fueled the minds of teenagers and other

social media users. It is something that has really gotten out of hand and should not be taken

lightly. From what I read from the opposing article, they really say that eating potatoes is equal

how social media increases the hurt from depression. With social media you see what other

people are doing with their lives, you begin to compare yourself, making you feel worse and

worse about how you live your life. It is very rare for kids to run into something positive on

Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, or even Twitter. It has gotten out of hand and people need to

realize this. We need to protect our future and our minds as much as we can, WHILE we can.