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Mental Health Is the Internet the cause of mental illness?

Markomarkh

Bluelighter
Joined
Jan 18, 2013
Messages
507
Before I had the internet and Microsoft computers I didn't have mental illnesses like depression, skitzo or anxiety. So is the Internet the cause of mental illness and problems?
 
The internet is just the internet. It is your relationship with the internet (what you use it for, how you use it, how much you use it) that defines whether it is a problem or not.
 
I don't think the internet causes those problems but I do think social media can make people act in narcissistic ways. Technology in general I think has made people more narcissistic and cut off from each other.
 
Not knowing your situation if you are glued to computer for extended period then yes it can harm you. This is especially true for IT professionals. Blue light from computer screens and stress of job can definitely contribute to Depression. You will find tons of corroborating info at jackkruse.com
 
Social media isn't good for your mental health. If you're already depressed and looking at all the "normal" people having fun (or pretending to), it will make you feel bad about yourself.

Plus there's tons of bad news on social media. I only go on when I feel mentally strong enough to weed out the bullshit.
 
Social media isn't good for your mental health. If you're already depressed and looking at all the "normal" people having fun (or pretending to), it will make you feel bad about yourself.

Plus there's tons of bad news on social media. I only go on when I feel mentally strong enough to weed out the bullshit.

Deleting Facebook in particular can dramatically improve mental health. The detrimental effects are widely understated and underestimated
 
Deleting Facebook in particular can dramatically improve mental health. The detrimental effects are widely understated and underestimated
maybe i should try this. what was life like b4 i joined...i can't quite recall
 
Deleting Facebook in particular can dramatically improve mental health. The detrimental effects are widely understated and underestimated

I think it could be a great experience. I see people living in Facebook even when they are out having lunch or in a party, at their breaks at work. I could go on forever. It's like someone has to go to the toilet every couple of minutes. Not fun particularly if you are together with a group doing outdoors activities, like travelling for God's sake!!
 
Deleting Facebook in particular can dramatically improve mental health. The detrimental effects are widely understated and underestimated

I'm going to jump on the bandwagon with everyone else and agree that facebook is a huge blight to mental health. I haven't been on there in years and have no desire to return to it as the constant onslaught of narcissistic feeds corrodes any hope I have for humanity. The thing is since deleting my account i've found it harder to maintain friendships with people because it seems to almost be a prerequisite nowadays to be hooked into social media 24/7. Really i've had people straight up tell me if I can't communicate via facebook then they can't be bothered to talk with me even through a cell/text messaging/email. There's plenty of different ways to communicate without facebook it's just that NOBODY wants to associate with you if you haven't drank the kool-aid of this modern era. They really truly believe it's those of us who don't want to be chained down to social media that have something wrong with us even though more and more research keeps coming out corroborating with the thinking that this obsession with social media is detrimental to our wellbeing.
One platform that's an exception goes by the name of Support Groups and it's basically a down-to-earth version of facebook where you can befriend other people and putting on a facade is discouraged. It has a completely different flavour to facebook where sharing your struggles and being authentic is encouraged thus making you feel less like a deviant rather than more.

Mental health issues existed way before the internet was around but certain things about it aggravate a troubled mind. In some ways its helped to discern and dispel some ignorance in the world but with things like facebook taking over peoples lives its also been detrimental to individuals and our culture as a whole.
 
It can be. The most typical thing back when people started getting online around here, 1999 was a year where people massively got cheap cable modem service. Anyway, people falling in love with each other when they are teenagers living 2000km away from each other, I have witnessed when I was on IRC a lot in a music ripping group, and yes there was actual chicks, I guess that didn't help, punk music ripping group, when myself I remember, I was one of about 5 people into punk, hardcore punk and stuff like that when I graduated high school, which was so strange, my pretty straight looking female cousins listened to punk, like AFI's 90's stuff (which was very different from when they became emo rock stars), she surprised me when she put on Very Proud of Ya at christmas party where a lot of family was together and at the age you start not liking christmas...Anyway, there wasn't a lot of people like me, so those other guys had nothing much to relate to, even less, they were often nerdier than me or already smoking weed, I was the only one who was playing baseball at the highest level possible in my northern canada city, the kind where I'd spend the summer on buses and it wasn't like when I first started to play out of boredom and my parents paid for me to be in the "home" league, meaning neighbourhood teams in the same city which was uber cheap, while "Midget AAA" is the last step.

Anyway, getting away from the subject, i've seen people go into deep depression from internet romance, like, a lot. And often back then people didn't even have photos scanned of themselves so they would be connecting only at the mind level, which I guess hurts even more? It's what I've observed.

There's also Internet Trolling Syndrome which is a non official but kind of pathology when taken to certain levels, but I guess we all knew that.

Also one thing, Youtube...find the way to disable suggestions to the right, some people go insane with the most ludicrous batshit insane fearporn on there and actually get addicted to it. Then they start wanting benzos.

One thing I think the Internet has done to me, in those teenage years is aggravate my Insomnia, diagnosed by a pedo-pediatrician who was right on the money. I miss the days when all I needed for sleep was valerian root pills that the doctor told my mother to buy. I remember how I liked them, my friend who has zero issue with sleep, a long time friend, back then I had him just take a whiff of the jar because I said it smelled strong and he was like what the hell the smell is making me feel sleepy.

After my parents divorced, I slept soundly, I think the 7 year of hell I had to endure until my dad got reasonable and said "okay goddamnit I'll pay a pension for the kids" was when my mom found in his pockets while doing laundry, that he had found a girlfriend on the internet on one of the first sites like okcupid, a bill receipt for female clothing, and then "the transition" was made smoothly, my mom continued to make his lunches (he's a trucker) until we left. So the Internet rocked the world in my family and I guess everyone who was a bit geeky before 2006, when web 2.0 and all the...I won't bother mentioning what I call them here, let's just say, the people who laughed at people who used the internet back in say 2000, I remember that. It's no longer a refuge from the outside world I gotta say.

As for Facebook, for the people I know who are too dumb to use what they always used before that, MSN messenger (myspace wasn't very popular in Canada), their accounts works on Skype, using Pidgin to keep talking to your friends who are ONLY reachable through Facebook other than phoning them, and I always hated the phone, not big on people who constantly talk on their phone or at their phone, people who do Facetime with anybody while waiting for the bus on their RFID Smart Device appall me. So I can just talk to people on facebook without being on Facebook with Pidgin, and it's easy to make it so that it's encrypted so facebook, if you login the site itself and look at your conversations, it will say "encrypted chat". The other party has to be willing to do it, which is very easy but people are so intellectually lazy..

But then it informed me of people it informed me existed that were some of the worst people in plain view at least of humanity, die, like Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller and that makes the cynic in me smile.
 
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It can be. The most typical thing back when people started getting online around here, 1999 was a year where people massively got cheap cable modem service. Anyway, people falling in love with each other when they are teenagers living 2000km away from each other, I have witnessed when I was on IRC a lot in a music ripping group, and yes there was actual chicks, I guess that didn't help, punk music ripping group, when myself I remember, I was one of about 5 people into punk, hardcore punk and stuff like that when I graduated high school, which was so strange, my pretty straight looking female cousins listened to punk, like AFI's 90's stuff (which was very different from when they became emo rock stars), she surprised me when she put on Very Proud of Ya at christmas party where a lot of family was together and at the age you start not liking christmas...Anyway, there wasn't a lot of people like me, so those other guys had nothing much to relate to, even less, they were often nerdier than me or already smoking weed, I was the only one who was playing baseball at the highest level possible in my northern canada city, the kind where I'd spend the summer on buses and it wasn't like when I first started to play out of boredom and my parents paid for me to be in the "home" league, meaning neighbourhood teams in the same city which was uber cheap, while "Midget AAA" is the last step.

Anyway, getting away from the subject, i've seen people go into deep depression from internet romance, like, a lot. And often back then people didn't even have photos scanned of themselves so they would be connecting only at the mind level, which I guess hurts even more? It's what I've observed.

There's also Internet Trolling Syndrome which is a non official but kind of pathology when taken to certain levels, but I guess we all knew that.

Also one thing, Youtube...find the way to disable suggestions to the right, some people go insane with the most ludicrous batshit insane fearporn on there and actually get addicted to it. Then they start wanting benzos.

One thing I think the Internet has done to me, in those teenage years is aggravate my Insomnia, diagnosed by a pedo-pediatrician who was right on the money. I miss the days when all I needed for sleep was valerian root pills that the doctor told my mother to buy. I remember how I liked them, my friend who has zero issue with sleep, a long time friend, back then I had him just take a whiff of the jar because I said it smelled strong and he was like what the hell the smell is making me feel sleepy.

After my parents divorced, I slept soundly, I think the 7 year of hell I had to endure until my dad got reasonable and said "okay goddamnit I'll pay a pension for the kids" was when my mom found in his pockets while doing laundry, that he had found a girlfriend on the internet on one of the first sites like okcupid, a bill receipt for female clothing, and then "the transition" was made smoothly, my mom continued to make his lunches (he's a trucker) until we left. So the Internet rocked the world in my family and I guess everyone who was a bit geeky before 2006, when web 2.0 and all the...I won't bother mentioning what I call them here, let's just say, the people who laughed at people who used the internet back in say 2000, I remember that. It's no longer a refuge from the outside world I gotta say.

As for Facebook, for the people I know who are too dumb to use what they always used before that, MSN messenger (myspace wasn't very popular in Canada), their accounts works on Skype, using Pidgin to keep talking to your friends who are ONLY reachable through Facebook other than phoning them, and I always hated the phone, not big on people who constantly talk on their phone or at their phone, people who do Facetime with anybody while waiting for the bus on their RFID Smart Device appall me. So I can just talk to people on facebook without being on Facebook with Pidgin, and it's easy to make it so that it's encrypted so facebook, if you login the site itself and look at your conversations, it will say "encrypted chat". The other party has to be willing to do it, which is very easy but people are so intellectually lazy..

But then it informed me of people it informed me existed that were some of the worst people in plain view at least of humanity, die, like Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller and that makes the cynic in me smile.

Pidgin linked me to some similar software for OS x. We'll see how this goes. Ironically, I could go for some Valerian root right now. Herbal supplements work way better when...:?
 
I think the main thing: With social media in particular: Is misuse. Or abuse. People post fundamentally inappropriate material on Facebook all the time because they don't know what Twitter is for. It's pretty sad actually, so I'm misusing this tool that connects me to the rest of the world so on some level of course this is going to precipitate in to at least on a sub conscious level some kind of moral and psychological traumatic ideation.
 
No and maybe it has not helped. I don't think that the internet alone would cause mental health problems such as schizophrenia as well as anxiety. But if you are spending a long time on your computer and are isolating yourself from family, friends and are unemployed then that will definitely not help your mental health problems. That's why it is stressed that even light exercise, such as going outside for a 20 minute walk, can have such a positive effect on your wellbeing as well as getting sunlight for your body to synthesise vitamin D. So, in short, spending a lot of time on the internet can have a negative effect on isolation and reduced human social interaction which can make your mental health worse, but is unlikely to be the sole causative factor.
 
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It doesn't cause mental illness, but it can exacerbate it. I have experienced increased anxiety, paranoia, depression, all from dumb social media...depending on the state of mind I'm in while being on there. If you have any tendency to be paranoid, just stay off of it because you will start to think that every negative subtweet or retweet is about you.

Sometimes I try to rationalize like "Well no one can be that much of a loser that they'd pick with a total stranger.", but there are plenty of losers who have nothing to do except sit up and be mean to people all day and night. Mean to just random people, not even necessarily celebrities. For my own mental health, I'm getting rid of it soon.
 
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I barely use mine to post stuff, basically i use it to see the exact opposite of what most do... people who should be adults still acting like teenagers. People who complain about things that they could fix but choose not to etc. What really annoys me is all the garbage political nonsense that has come to encompass facebook in the last 18 months. I thought people gave me fodder to hate on them, mock them, and otherwise mentally belittle them to myself before but holy shit lol.

When I post things its like cryptic shit that is me bragging about my life but not revealing why such as the clip from dexter's laboratory "what a fine day for science" when im sciencing up some magic and something about tiny rick when the magic is done. This might have to do with wine making, studying, assembling a device, but as i often say "i really only use facebook to mock people i know to myself or make cryptic brag posts that im shocked when people like or comment."

Never really cared to be social so social media is an extension of what i do best, judge people often unfairly mentally and brag about myself discretely. If anything it improves my mental health lol
 
the ability to compare yourself to 7 billion people is unhealthy
 
Internet addiction is real. More commonly, internet dependence.

Would you say it is internet dependence or dopamine dependance from saturating the receptors by overstimulation through use of social media and the internet?
 
Things are more complicated than that...

I wouldn't guess that social media could cause that big of surge, but there are people whom go to rehab for internet addiction. Most I've heard of can't stop playing online games.

It's more correct to think of a receptor than a chemical. For instance dopamine binds to inhibitory and excitatory receptors.

Generally speaking, too much artificial dopaminergic activity over too long a time is said to underlie most addictions. Dependence is different, though.
 
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