[THREAD] Let's talk about social media and mental health. There is the good, the bad and the ugly and we are going to break it down and talk about some prevention methods or if there is already mental health issues, talking about mitigating some of the bad impact of social media.

The good is that social media can allow us to stay in touch with friends from all over the world, surround ourselves with people we like/admire and follow accounts that can be educational or supportive. This is something that can help us with our mental health and the good side.

However, social media also presents a lot of issues. One of the main problems is misinformation. When it comes to so many important topics including mental health, social media makes it easy for misinformation to spread causing potential harm to those who seek help.

We see it a lot with the pandemic and the information around the virus. So many viral (pun intended) posts had a lot of misinformation in them, causing a lot of harm and spread to continue. However, even when it comes to following people we like, there could be issues.

Social media is a very artificial environment that does not reflect our reality at all. We control what we post and usually post it in a way that makes us look good. That means that it does not show how real life is. We can show only the good and fun side.

For people who are depressed/anxious, seeing people having fun or enjoying life can be very triggering and make them as though they are not measuring up or their life is worse than most people, even if it is not true. No one's life is exactly how they show it on social media.

This artificial environment of competing for who has the most goods, most fun, most trips, can get exhausting for both who compete in it and those who witness those curated accounts showing only the fun side. While there is nothing bad about doing so, it can harm mental health.

The ugly is that many people don't pay attention at all to trigger warnings and you can open your feed only to stumble onto threads containing abuses, assaults, and things that can trigger a lot of people, specifically those with PTSD and severe anxiety.

While more accounts are making sure to put trigger warnings, which is awesome, more people don't care or even find it fun to trigger others and this is something that can unfortunately, ruin someone's day. So how can we prevent those bad sides of social media while keep the good?

For one, we need to control our time on social media, it can be easy to simply get lost in it for most of the day, especially in a quarantine situation where there may not be much to do. However, that can backfire and affect our mental health big time.

Keeping our social media consumption to 1-2 hours a day can help a lot as opposed to more hours on our phones. Furthermore, it is important to follow accounts that can educate, raise awareness and be mindful of other people's feelings and triggers.

The ugly of social media is that there are people outright sending messages of assaults of various kinds, those who seek to trigger us simply because they don't agree with us. In this case, please block right away to avoid more of these triggering messages and take breaks.

There are times when breaks from social media, even if it is just 24 hours or a whole weekend can help a lot, allow us to regroup and take care of our mental health. By the way, social media can't count for our self-care unfortunately.

Therefore, we need time away from social media as part of our self-care as well. Please be mindful of how social media affects your mental health and don't hesitate to block/ghost/remove people who are triggering to your mental health in order to keep the good only.