Social Media and Mental Health: Benefits, Risks, and Best Practices

Mental Health Support & Advice

Many adults and young people are turning to social media for psychological advice and find it to be a place to share their mental health struggles. For them, this is a place they find a sense of connection and emotional support. Social media can help spread awareness about mental health through support groups, sharing of mental health articles, and normalizing the use of mental health counseling. Posts that talk about trauma, anxiety, and depression can decrease the stigma around these and other mental health issues.

In many remote communities, access to mental health counselors is far more limited than in urban settings. Online therapy, digital forums, and virtual support groups bridge that gap, reaching individuals who might go without help. In this way, some forms of social media help clients build a supportive community where they can help themselves. This can be useful in beginning the healing process or complementing professional mental health counseling in more accessible areas. Social media is not intended to be a replacement for therapy, but many people have found some mental health benefits using it.

Self-Expression

Social media allows users to express their creativity and their authentic selves through posts, videos, and online content. Art, writing, and stories can be shared through social media. Some use social media as a journal. Unlike a traditional journal in which a person keeps their thoughts, feelings, and experiences private, they publicly share them with others. 

In a supportive community, this can become a safe space to process feelings and thoughts and to self-reflect. According to research, younger generations, including Generation Z, feel empowered through their social media expressions. Adobe Communications 2022 states, “This demographic often uses these platforms to explore their identities, with many feeling more comfortable in their skin when engaging online”.

When posts are not seen because of an algorithm or not enough people have interacted with them, this can affect the social media user’s mental health. People feel inadequate or lonely when their self-expression is not validated or acknowledged. This is when users may change their expression. Self-expression becomes repressed when a user feels pressured to share content that is popular or supports the algorithm rather than being authentic. In these instances, it becomes a performance to get more likes, comments, and shares. 

Clients who experience this can develop symptoms such as anxiety, depression, and sleep disturbances. As counselors, we can inquire how social media helps clients express who they are and in what ways it holds back their expression.

Young Brains and Social Media

The population most at risk for mental health issues and social media is adolescents. Adolescence is a time of finding one’s identity, navigating emotions, and managing hormonal changes. The brain is not fully formed until the mid-twenties, making this a vulnerable time for some young adults, especially on social media.

Posts from friends and videos from strangers encourage a variety of risk-taking behaviors. Young people can be lured into sex trafficking and abuse, some self-harm, or others commit suicide. Some young people watch risk-taking behavior on social media and copy it, filming themselves. The temptation to gain social attention through likes, comments, and shares can be overwhelming for some young adults who emulate what they see without considering the consequences. Others may develop FOMO, a fear of missing out. This is a type of anxiety fueled by the thought that others are having more fun and the person is missing out on it. Young adults who experience FOMO often report feelings of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and isolation from others.

Social media has been linked to upward comparisons among individual users. Rather than viewers comparing themselves to others who are similar to themselves, people compare themselves to others on social media who have more than they do. 

This can lead to social anxiety, depression, and low self-worth: “High social media use increases the impression among youth that others are better off than themselves, negatively influencing their self-worth and subjective well-being” (Goldberg 2023).

Talk to clients about how many social media users curate their lives to look a specific, polished way, which often is not true to reality. Help clients spend less time on social media by encouraging offline activities and having them consider unfollowing certain pages. 

Counselor Information on Social Media

Counselors who share private details through interviews or social media can be read by their clients. This can lead to unintentional self-disclosures. Since these types of disclosures occur outside of the counseling session, there is no way of knowing how they affect the client.

It is best practice for counselors to share private information on their private social media pages or not at all. Care needs to be taken to avoid harming clients. Professional pages can be publicly accessed by all, including one’s clients. This means professional information is shared, such as articles or videos focused solely on mental health, rather than familial, political, or personal experiences.