Snapchat’s Effect on Our Teens’ Mental Health

Co-authored by Joshua Miller

Parents are more concerned than ever about their children’s mental health. Studies show that social media use has a strong effect on our teens’ daily emotions and behavior. Rather than write yet another article lamenting teens’ social media usage, I invited my nineteen-year-old son, Joshua, to co-author this Jews in the Digital Age column with me to ensure it includes perspectives from both a parent and a teen. 

Parents of teens are familiar with and use social network applications like Facebook and Instagram. They have also, in recent years, begun to use TikTok, the popular video application. However, Snapchat is different since most parents do not use it and are generally unaware of their teens’ activity on the platform.

Snapchat’s own annual reports explain that it is used primarily by high school and college students. The mobile application allows users to share photos, videos, and messages. As of February 2023, Snapchat has approximately 750 million monthly active users, 63% of which use the application regularly, and more than three billion snaps are created and exchanged each day.

Snapchat causes negative mental health issues, such as anxiety and depression, in high school and college students, making it an activity that should be high on the concern list of parents, teachers and mental health professionals. There exists a worldwide mental health crisis among teens and college students, and the use of Snapchat is prevalent among this age demographic. Studies have been conducted to show a causal relationship between Snapchat use and this mental health crisis.

Many teens will be enjoying a fun experience with family or friends, and then experience a sudden mood swing upon opening the Snapchat application on their phone. The phone screen will display photos of their friends' activities, who they’re with, and where they are currently located using Snapchat’s “Snap Map” GPS (global positioning system) feature. The teen who seemed to be happy and content is now feeling lonely, anxious and depressed thanks to the “fear of missing out.” Commonly known by the acronym “FOMO,” Snapchat contributes to this fear by making it appear that others in the teen’s peer group are enjoying life more. The teen often feels that they have not been invited or included in a competing activity even though they were satisfied with their situation prior to looking at the “Snap Map.” Seeing what others are posting on Snapchat, the teen loses focus and cannot be present with the people they are actually with in real life (“IRL”).

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.

Robin Williams, Jacob in the Torah and Depression

I’ve never cried when a celebrity suddenly dies. It has always seemed like something that just happens. Certainly, it’s a sad day when an actor or musician, athlete or politician has “cashed in their chips” early. I mean don’t get me wrong, I’ve been shocked and saddened when I’ve learned of the lethal overdose of a promising young athlete or when the news breaks that a famous actor has lost his battle with cancer. But Robin Williams wasn’t just any comedian. He wasn’t your typical actor or entertainer. Robin Williams was the textbook definition of “comedic genius.”

Robin Williams grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan only a few miles from my childhood home and, while not Jewish by birth, he was widely known as an honorary Jew – both for his brand of humor (always peppered with a Yiddish expression and Jewish inflection) and for his unwavering commitment to Jewish causes. I’ve cried several times in the past couple of days since hearing of his untimely death. He was a brilliant at entertaining us.

Like most of my generation, I was first introduced to the silliness of Robin Williams as a young child tuning in to every episode of “Mork and Mindy.” It was my mimicking of Robin’s goofy antics in kindergarten that led the teacher to tell my parents I was a “class clown.” And then I found my father’s audio cassettes of his standup routines, “Robin Williams: A Night at the Met” and “Reality… What a Concept.” I listened to those tapes dozens of times and brought them with me to summer camp to entertain my friends. The counselors told my parents I should be a standup comedian. Not long after that my dad took me to see “Good Morning Vietnam” in the theater and then I bought the video tape as soon as it came out, memorizing long segments of the movie and then performing them in front of my class at my Jewish day school. The teacher told my parents that I should tone down my R-rated humor.