Tech and mental illness?

[Nebulous]

In your opinion has an increase in the use of technology affected the rise of mental illness?

[Moonface]

Absolutely.

Sites like Facebook can make people compare themselves to others due to being constantly exposed to everyone else's lives on their feed. Add in a like system that can come off like a popularity gauge and seeing others get a lot while getting few yourself can create a feeling of being lesser or unpopular.

While not necessarily mental illness, the attention span of people is definitely lower with what tech is at their disposal nowadays. Phones in the past would only let you call and text while driving, and if you had no need to do either of those the phone didn't really have anything else to offer. Now though you can just open up any app or website and so the temptation to use a phone when you shouldn't be is way higher, and I feel like people who can't hold off on doing that have maybe developed such a reliance on technology to entertain themselves that wasn't present in the early 2000's.

I don't think the tech itself is to blame though but the combination of it with the rise of social media. If you couldn't access Facebook outside of a PC there would be time away from it to detach, but having all these apps in your pocket that can open a person up to possible feelings of anxiety, depression, anger, etc. just creates a cascading effect. You'll either want a fix because it makes you feel better or you need it to try and either prove to yourself something isn't as bad as your mind says it is or you'll seek validation of negative thoughts, a.k.a. doom scrolling.

[ShiraNoMai]

Yep. All of what Moony said, because what our brains crave the most is dopamine. And having a little dopamine box at your beck and call, oh well, that's just absolutely ripe for brains! We're pretty simple creatures--complex brains, but are easily swayed by the effects of dopamine (which, by the way, is our happy neurotransmitter).

In short, when we become reliant on it to give us that "hit" we want, it easily gets bound to the plasticity of our brains, and we begin to build expectations based off of the conditioning we receive on things like social media, app notifications, "haha number go up!", etc. And when expectations aren't met, brains are not very pleased with that. That's where things get real messy.