How To Deal With Facebook Depression

Is this your dilemma that you’ve plonked yourself down on the couch in your neighbourhood coffee shop, surrounded by a bunch of your friends, utterly depressed. Laughter rings all around you and conversation flows as freely as the coffee, but you’re too busy checking your FB page every half a nanosecond to see if someone has commented on the status update you posted three minutes ago.

You are consumed by hurt because not even one of the 643 friends on your list has bothered acknowledging your post. Well, you may be a victim of what is known as Facebook Depression, a new condition that affects scores of teenagers around the globe.

Experts add this condition to the list of potential harms linked with social media. College student Yazhini Kumar agrees and says, “If our FB or Twitter pages are inactive for even a few minutes, we start hyperventilating. We start feeling that no one cares about us anymore.” Ashwin Shekar, adds, “Most of us students depend a lot more on our popularity online than how much our own circles of close friends like us. It’s the classic case of being around a million people and still feeling alone.”

Sociologist Rashmi K says, “Social networking sites are a tough social landscape to steer, especially for those youngsters who already have a poor sense of self-esteem. If their pages are not as buzzing and active as that of their peers, they feel like they have failed, like they don’t quite measure up. Also, when they look at photos of people looking happy all the time and all over the place, they feel upset with their own lives.” She adds, “And sometimes, the depression comes when someone posts something unsavoury about them, out for the whole world to read. If this condition is not addressed, it might have dire consequences.” Perhaps, quite like the widely publicized suicide of a 15-year-old girl from the US, after she’d been bullied on Facebook.

Here are a few tips to keep FB depression at bay:

• - Encourage parents to talk with their kids about online use and its risks.
• - Awareness on the right usage of social networking sites must be spread.
• - Net etiquette must be taught.
• - Connecting with friends and family, and sharing ideas, should be given importance.