Health

 Medical Express - In a study published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, a team of researchers, led by experts at Johns Hopkins Children's Center, investigated the association among social media use, depression and other health-related behaviors of young adults over time.

"Research shows that when social media use is high, depression is also high. But the question is—is that because social media caused that person to be depressed? Or is it because people who are depressed tend to also use social media more, and spend less time exercising and being in green spaces? That is what we wanted to understand," says Carol Vidal, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., the first author of the study, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Children's Center and an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine...

The researchers found that most study participants had at least mild depressive symptoms. Findings showed that participants who had higher social media use tended to be more depressed, and people who were more depressed also tended to use social media more. However, researchers found that social media use did not cause an increase or decrease in depressive symptom levels over time. "We found that if you tended to be a person who was depressed, you were a person also spending more time on social media," explains Vidal.