Social Media & Mental Health Education

 Social Media & Mental Health - A Match Made in the Classroom

It's not an over exaggeration to say that social media has revolutionized our world. Thanks to sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Youtube, and TikTok, information has been shared across the globe at a rate never before seen. Social media has also made our world a little smaller, connecting people separated by oceans and continents. Unfortunately, for all of the great things social media has done for us, it doesn't come without a price. This week I explored the negative effects social media has left on our society, specifically on teens and children. 

After reviewing articles from The Washington Post, CNN, and The New York Times, it's clear that social media can quickly become harmful, especially when its users are still developing an understanding of themselves and the world they live in. Growing up is hard enough without having a window into everyone else's seemingly "perfect lives" to compare to our own. Fortunately, mental health education and lessons related to digital citizenship have started to find their way into K-12 classrooms. I would argue, that as educators begin to bring up these two meaningful lessons and conversations into their classrooms, that they should clearly draw a connection between the two ideas for their students.

As emphasized in the articles I read, social media can have an extremely negative impact on a student's mental health, especially if a student is already struggling with mental health issues. Not only do I think it is a missed opportunity for educators not to mention social media when discussing mental health, but I think it does a disservice to their students. Growing up with social media readily accessible to them, many students are not fully aware of the impact it can have on their mental health, particularly their perceptions of themselves. That is why I think it would be a perfect opportunity for educators to teach these two ideas hand-and-hand. 

A mental health resource that I have used in the classroom that brings social media into the conversation is Erika's Lighthouse's "We All Have Mental Health" presentation. While the main focus of this lesson is to bring awareness to mental health, primarily depression and anxiety, to intermediate elementary students, I was happy to see that the lesson I used with my 6th graders mentioned how we shouldn't take what we see on social media at face value, and that we should not compare ourselves to the filtered versions others are letting us see of themselves online.

As I go forward in my career in education, I plan to use a mental health lens when teaching my students about digital citizenship. I truly do not think it will be hard to bring light to mental health when taking about media literacy and social media, specifically on topics related posting, commenting, sharing, and presenting ourselves online. As tech-savvy as they may be, many adolescence are blissfully unaware of how their scrolling on TikTok or Instagram or posting on Snapchat can negatively impact their lives. The impact of social media on mental health is yet another important topic that educators must bring into their classrooms.