Is Social Media Actually ruining our lives?

Is social media actually ruining our lives? The answer is yes and no. Social media isn’t the reason a whole bunch of teens have mental illnesses. There are so many things. According to research the #1 cause for mental illnesses are “Severe psychological trauma suffered as a child, such as emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. An important early loss, such as the loss of a parent.” Other causes could be bullying, being passed down through genetics, losing friends, ect.

Sure social media doesn’t help, but its not the main cause. Yesterday with the assembly there were a lot of incorrect calculations. 100% of sexual predators don’t actually have snap-chat.  I have family members who know these things because they work with people have have that kind of trauma. Studies show that more people get sexually assaulted by family and friends than they do by predators online. Anyways I am going to move on to other things. When you deal with mental illnesses, it’s hard. I’ve dealt with mental health stuff for like the past 3 or 4 years. So when you say that we are in charge, and we can change how we think and stuff like that, you are right but also wrong. It took me months to finally somewhat feel happy again. So for you to say that we can change, it feels very invalidating to teens who deal with mental illnesses. Especially if you had the same horrible mindset for a long time.

Another thing social media can be an amazing thing. If it wasn’t for the internet and YouTube, I would’ve never learned how to play the ukulele, and draw, and sing, and everything like that.

Sometimes social media is how you connect to your friends. So when adults say you need to talk to our friends, we do! We do it all day! Sure you got outside more but that’s because you guys had less consequences. You had more freedom. Social media is like the most freedom we have. We can do anything we want anytime. Now sure sometimes it can be bad, but instead of telling us to get off our devices to not get groomed online or bullied only, telling the people who’s doing that stuff to stop grooming kids and to stop cyber bullying. Its that simple. Just a reminder that this is my opinion and if you have a different opinion I respect that, this is just my opinion.

If you want to read other peoples opinions on this you can go to, “Tea Time with Anna” on edublogs.