Does Facebook Lead to Depression?

For the past few years I've been reading a lot about what's become known as "Facebook Depression." When an old friend who has since moved out of town came to visit and told me she had deactivated her Facebook account (I hadn't noticed), I asked why. She explained that she and her husband had been struggling to have another baby and seeing so many posts from her friends announcing they were pregnant was enough to drive her insane. Rather than endure the abundance of joyful posts of healthy ultrasound images and photos of pregnant bellies and newborn smiles, she simply pulled the plug on her Facebook account. What follows is my recent article on the so called "Facebook Depression" in the Detroit Jewish News:

In 2004 when Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg started The Facebook he never imagined that ten years later there would be over 1 billion users on the social networking site. He also never imagined that it would be painfully difficult for him and his wife to see the happy photos uploaded to the site of their peers smiling with their newborn babies.

On July 31, Zuckerberg made a public post to Facebook announcing that he and his wife Priscilla Chan were expecting a child. While nothing would be unusual about such an announcement on Facebook – they occur every day – the Facebook founder and CEO elaborated on the challenges the couple endured in sustaining a healthy pregnancy.

“Priscilla and I have some exciting news: we're expecting a baby girl!” Zuckerberg continued, “We want to share one experience to start. We've been trying to have a child for a couple of years and have had three miscarriages along the way… It's a lonely experience. Most people don't discuss miscarriages because you worry your problems will distance you or reflect upon you -- as if you're defective or did something to cause this. So you struggle on your own... When we started talking to our friends, we realized how frequently this happened -- that many people we knew had similar issues and that nearly all had healthy children after all. We hope that sharing our experience will give more people the same hope we felt and will help more people feel comfortable sharing their stories as well.”

It’s entirely possible that that Zuckerberg and Chan were suffering from what has been labeled as “Facebook Depression.” In their dark days of suffering through the emotional pain of their miscarriages, we can only assume that using the social network that he created became something of a torturous activity. Scanning through dozens of joyous memory-filled photos on Facebook of friends’ children likely had negative effects on their well-being. Each status announcement that rose to the top of their Facebook Newsfeed broadcasting another pregnancy or birth or milestone reminded this famous couple of their inability to sustain a pregnancy and produce a viable offspring – one they undoubtedly looked forward to showing off on Facebook.

I Gave "Kosher Soul" a Second Chance

A friend tipped me off to a new reality TV show that was about to begin publicizing its pilot episode. I was immediately intrigued. The show, Kosher Soul, is about a pretty Jewish woman and a Black comedian who fall in love. I clicked the link to find the trailer from the Lifetime network and was immediately disappointed. Oy, I thought to myself, this is not going to be "good for the Jews."

I posted the link to the trailer in a few rabbi discussion groups I'm part of and encouraged my colleagues to check out this video and give their own opinion. It was unanimous that we all cringed when we saw the typical, run-of-the-mill Jewish jokes interspersed with sub-par humor about African-Americans. One of my Rabbis Without Borders colleagues suggested we have a conference call right after the first episode airs so we can discuss and determine the best way to articulate our dismay of this farcical portrayal of everything from interdating to conversion to Black/Jewish relations.

©2015 A&E Television Networks, LLC. All rights reserved. Photo Credit: Richard Knapp

I helped coordinate the conference call, and we all seemed to have the same impressions about the show. It was a car wreck! I explained how I too was uncomfortable with the show, but that generally I detest reality television because it's almost as unreal as any other television sitcom. The actors are performing for the cameras, each episode has a theme, and the editors are going to cut the raw footage down to a bunch of sound bites for the 20 or so minutes of the final cut. It seemed to me, I explained, that O'Neal McKnight, the Black comedian, was trying to hard to market his comedy routines by offering one-liners that made me yawn rather than laugh out loud. The Jewish partner, Miriam Sternoff, came off as a snob who never seemed to feel comfortable having her private life aired to the masses. I didn't learn anything new from the conference call, but my sentiments about the show seemed to be the party line among my colleagues. I watched the first episode so I could have a coherent dialogue with my fellow rabbis and then, I reasoned, I'd never watch another episode of this filth again.

Pew Study and the JDate Effect on Intermarriage

While many Jewish leaders have been bemoaning the results of the 200-plus page report from the Pew Research Center about the current state of Jewish Americans, I have been trying to extract some positive from the numbers. Of course, like any study, the numbers don't tell the whole story. Anecdotal information is a much better guide to measure the health of the Jewish community.

Just looking at the numbers and the graphs of the recently released Pew Research study as it relates to intermarriage is alarming. However, the statistics really aren't too surprising when put in the context of the ever-changing community in which we live. What is noteworthy, however, is that on the intermarriage grid within the study from 1999 going forward, the intermarriage rate actually tapered off. Iit's interesting how that's right around the time when JDate.com really caught on among Jewish singles.

Domestic Violence is Real (Chukat)

In this week’s parsha, Chukat, Moses is once again feeling the stress of leadership. Tired and quickly losing hope following the death of his sister Miriam, the Israelites complain to Moses that they would have rather died in Egypt. They go so far as to wish they had died a horrible death along with those punished for joining Korach’s rebellion. They grumble that they were happier during their slave years in Egypt, where at least they had certain assurances compared to their current nomadic experience. They protest that they have been brought to a wretched place with no good food to eat or water to drink.