Social Nightmare
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Social media can equal social suicide in a teen’s life these days. We live in a world where everyone has anxiety or is depressed these days. Just writing that last sentence, made me depressed. I feel better now, thank you Zoloft. Anyways, back to depression, it has only gotten worse for everyone with the advent of social media, and it can be twice as bad for teenagers and young kids. Child psychiatrist and mother of none, Heather Bowman has come up with a company and a plan to combat social media induced depression. Heather explained, “First off, the main reason social media causes depression is because the only stuff people post about is good things happening to them. People or in my case kids see everyone else but them enjoying life on these sites or apps. For example, they will see posts of their friends smiling while on vacation somewhere beautiful and then they will get depressed because they are home on this app watching someone else having fun. The truth is the person who is posting that vacation picture hates their lives just as much as the other people and probably don’t want to even be on that trip with their parents. So what I have done is starting to work with all the social media crAPPs as I call it to invent fake accounts that will constantly be posted on kids/teenagers apps. For example, as they scroll, they will see my fake accounts with kids who post nothing but bad things that are happening.”
Heather’s company is called Happy Media and we saw the beta launch of her accounts and boy do these kids have it rough. One post had a kid post a picture of himself with one leg with him saying, “darn snowplow took off one of my legs, thanks dad for making me finish before taking me to the hospital.” Another one posted a kid with no hair saying, “Leukemia really sucks but at least now I can play the C card if I want to get out something.” Others were less horrible, like the one where a girl posted a picture of her big toe all bruised, saying “just stubbed my toe, hope your day is going better.” Happy Media is able to have their posts embedded on the apps and into teens feeds so they feel less depressed. She is able to do that through sponsorships. For example, the kid with one leg has a Coca Cola shirt on centered in the picture. The kid with cancer has the Cleveland Clinic logo right next them. The sponsorships help drive Heather’s company.
Heather really feels that by having these kids see other kids whose life also sucks will make them happier in the long run. Worst case for Heather is she gets more kids in her psychiatry office. She also says if her practice and this account thing doesn’t work out, she says she at least has a ton of Pfizer stock (the maker of Zoloft) to fall back on.
