Feeling Bad on Facebook: Depression disclosures by college students on a Social Networking Site

By Megan A. Moreno, Lauren Jelenchick, Katie G. Egan, Elizabeth D. Cox, H. Young, Kerry Gannon, Tara Becker. Depression and Anxiety, 2011

610 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background: Depression is common and frequently undiagnosed among college students. Social networking sites are popular among college students and can include displayed depression references. The purpose of this study was to evaluate college students' Facebook disclosures that met DSM criteria for a depression symptom or a major depressive episode (MDE). Methods: We selected public Facebook profiles from sophomore and junior undergraduates and evaluated personally written text: “status updates.” We applied DSM criteria to 1‐year status updates from each profile to determine prevalence of displayed depression symptoms and MDE criteria. Negative binomial regression analysis was used to model the association between depression disclosures and demographics or Facebook use characteristics. Results: Two hundred profiles were evaluated, and profile owners were 43.5% female with a mean age of 20 years. Overall, 25% of profiles displayed depressive symptoms and 2.5% met criteria for MDE. Profile owners were more likely to reference depression, if they averaged at least one online response from their friends to a status update disclosing depressive symptoms (exp(B) = 2.1, P<.001), or if they used Facebook more frequently (P<.001). Conclusion: College students commonly display symptoms consistent with depression on Facebook. Our findings suggest that those who receive online reinforcement from their friends are more likely to discuss their depressive symptoms publicly on Facebook. Given the frequency of depression symptom displays on public profiles, social networking sites could be an innovative avenue for combating stigma surrounding mental health conditions or for identifying students at risk for depression. Depression and Anxiety, 2011. © 2011 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f0ab94ab8062f0ff087106fe1f54034fe4e1a7be

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Citations in the corpus

Facebook use, envy, and depression among college students: Is facebooking depressing? (2015, background): “However, policy makers and scholars have hypothesized that heavy use of online social networks such as Facebook and mobile technologies may contribute to the phenomenon (Chou & Edge, 2012; Jelenchick, Eickhoff, & Moreno, 2013; Moreno et al., 2011; Soo Jeong et al., 2013).”
"My Voice Is Definitely Strongest in Online Communities": Students Using Social Media for Queer and Disability Identity-Making (2017, background): “Social media use has been associated with the possibility of psychological distress, including feelings of loneliness, depression, and envy (Moreno et al., 2011; Tandoc, Ferrucci, & Duffy, 2015), though the causes and extent of this phenomenon are debated in the literature (Beranuy, Oberst,…”
Can You Guess Who I Am? Real, Ideal, and False Self-Presentation on Facebook Among Emerging Adults (2015, background): “Moreno et al. (2011) also reported that college students used Facebook to display their depressive symptoms, and those who received reinforcement from friends expressed their depressive symptoms to a greater extent.”
Seeing everyone else's highlight reels: How Facebook usage is linked to depressive symptoms. (2014, background): “Previous research has demonstrated that Facebook use or excessive internet use predicted depression (Moreno et al., 2011; Morrison & Gore, 2010).”
Detection of Depression-Related Posts in Reddit Social Media Forum (2019, neutral): “[30] evaluated the status updates of 200 Facebook users by using the references to ‘‘self-declared’’ diagnoses identified through ‘‘I feel hopeless’’ statements.”
Mental Health Discourse on reddit: Self-Disclosure, Social Support, and Anonymity (2014, background): “Moreover, it is established that any psychological consequence depends on the activities a technology enables, attributes of the user, and how the two interact.”
Leveraging Large Language Models for Mental Health Prediction via Online Text Data (2023, background): “Since then, researchers have proposed a wide range of feature engineering methods and built machine-learning models for the prediction [9, 54, 56, 83].”
Natural language processing in mental health applications using non-clinical texts† (2017, background): “Moreno and Jelenchick (2011) manually evaluated a year’s worth of status updates of 200 college students.”
Authenticity and well-being on social network sites: A two-wave longitudinal study on the effects of online authenticity and the positivity bias in SNS communication (2014, background): “According to Utz (2011), positive experiences are the most frequent content of self-disclosure on SNSs whereas only a minority of users express negative experiences such as feelings of depression (Moreno et al., 2011).”
Fear of missing out: Relationships with depression, mindfulness, and physical symptoms. (2016, background): “For example, how the research related to social media and positive and negative emotions extends to clinical psychological disorders such as depression has been examined in only two studies, which did not include FoMO (Moreno et al., 2011; Steers, Wickham, & Acitelli, 2014).”
Too Many ‘Friends,’ Too Few ‘Likes’? Evolutionary Psychology and ‘Facebook Depression’ (2015, background): “%) do not adjust their privacy settings (Lewis, Kaufman, & Christakis, 2008; Moreno et al., 2011); however, there have been observable trends in how users have modified their privacy and disclosure settings as a response to the growth and changes in Facebook.”
ASSOCIATION BETWEEN SOCIAL MEDIA USE AND DEPRESSION AMONG U.S. YOUNG ADULTS (2016, background): “Additionally, there may be useful ways of leveraging social media to decrease stigma of depression and identify individuals at risk, such as detecting self-disclosures of depression on social media.[50] Because social media has become an integrated component of human interaction, it is important for”