6 Ways Social Media Affects Our Mental Health Summary

Our society has become accustomed to using social media everywhere we go. Whether its to show our fellow follower the wonderful vacation you are having with your friends and family, or to show what you ordered at a restaurant. Many people fell the need to over shared their life with the people who follow them. In the article “6 Ways Social Media Affects Our Mental Health” by Alice G. Walton, she explains how the constant use of social media can have detrimental effects on our mental health. She successfully does this by using Irony to pursue the reader to believe that social media caused “perceived social isolation”, Appeal to Authority to shed light on how social media can create a vicious circle of jealousy and envy, and Analogy to explain how social media can lead to addiction disorders

Having this accessibility to other people lives can cause “perceived social isolation”, a term that Walton says “is one of the worst things for [people]” (Walton). This perceived social isolation correlates with “the more time people spent on these sites, the more socially isolated they perceived themselves to be” (Walton). Walton demonstrated the irony in this term by explaining that despite people having a means to communicate with others through the use of social media, our human nature to compare ourselves to others takes over our mental view of oneself in society, making us think we are alone when in reality we are not. One can only imagine that with this environment of constant comparison and sadness, depression can easily creep in. But with sadness and depression, comes jealousy and envy, which is another aspect of social media that causes us, users, to have a poor mental