Does Facebook Contribute to Depression?

Facebook sits in a category of its own. Somewhere around a billion people, more than one in seven humans alive, show up on the platform in one form or another: a personal profile, a fan page, a business page. That reach comes with a cost, and this piece looks at the ways the site might be feeding into the depression so many people carry.

As a tool for staying in contact with friends, family, and the random assortment of people we bump into through groups or games, it does a decent job. What it does not do is stand in for friendship happening in real time. It can't, and it shouldn't try. Mobile phones let us track our friends everywhere now. We check in at the places we hang out, we tag the people we're with. For a laugh you can check in at a Starbucks somewhere in Southern California and tag your best Facebook friend who happens to live in New York.

In a way the platform took over the job the old pen pal system used to do back in grade school, when kids mailed letters to strangers on the other side of the map. These days you meet those strangers inside a group or over a game instead. And if you're lucky enough to travel, you can still turn an online contact into a flesh-and-blood friend. Meeting someone face to face after knowing them only through a screen carries a particular kind of thrill. The whole web of digital connections suddenly feels less abstract.

That matches how relationships were built to work. Widening your circle online is genuinely useful, but the intimate, in-person friendship is something no feed can reproduce. Human wiring doesn't bend on that point. Chronic loneliness ranks among the heavier drivers of depression, in teenagers and in grown adults alike. A thread of messages on Facebook Messenger can take the edge off that isolation for a while. Sitting across from someone over coffee, or heading out to a movie together, does something the thread never will.

The site can still point you toward the real thing. Local groups turn up on Facebook, and they used to turn up on Yahoo too. Remember Yahoo? That was more or less the first social network anyone had. The difference is that Yahoo meant camping in a chat room for hours on end, whereas Facebook asks for a post, a check-in at some spot, a shared photo, then a couple of quick log-ins a day to glance at notifications, drop a comment, and like whatever people said back to you.

Other platforms lean harder into the offline side. Meetup is the obvious one. You grab the app, sign in, and scan for events near you, which gives you a reason to leave the house and a shot at meeting people in person. The ones you hit it off with you can always add on Facebook afterward.

Trying to grow a close friendship entirely inside Facebook misses the point of the thing and rarely works anyway. Meeting people in the flesh, and reconnecting with the ones you already know, is how closeness actually deepens. That face-to-face contact chips away at the sense of being cut off, which is the sense that so often slides into depression and anxiety. The platform was built to keep people in touch with friends and family in the first place. Meeting anyone anywhere in the world, then meeting them in person later, is simply the pen pal idea in modern dress.

Messenger has added a few features worth mentioning. One is the voice recorder: tired of typing, you speak your message and send the recording. A friend of mine swore it beat talking on the phone, which is funny, since talking into the recorder on your phone is pretty much talking on the phone. There's also the business angle. A Facebook page lets you market what you do and reach a wider audience. And you can play matchmaker, introducing one friend to another when you sense some chemistry between them. No telling where that leads.

So social media can tip us toward being antisocial, sure. Used a certain way, though, a site like Facebook nudges you in the opposite direction, out toward other people. For anyone fighting depression, being around others beats being alone, especially if you can find a person or two to know beyond the surface. Looked at that way, these networks hand you a far larger pool of people to reach out to.

Erwin Bishop