Can Facebook Make You Depressed?

Before I landed on being a counselor, at one point I thought I was going to become a full-time writer or, at the very least, make writing—whatever the form might be—a career. So, I went to back to school in my early thirties to pursue a MFA in creative writing. While there, the director of my MFA program preached about the dangers of comparing yourself to other writers—you can render yourself not only artistically paralyzed, but also emotionally frozen by focusing on how much better you think everyone else is compared to you. I can honestly say, I never experienced more than small flickers of envy and comparing during those two and a half years I was at that program. Then, I graduated, thrust into the Real World where I encountered a serious problem with comparing, encounters that got increasingly more emotionally upsetting over time.

Now, years later, as a mental health counselor AND as a client of therapy myself, I know that comparing yourself to others is a normal and even healthy way to measure your own successes and failures. However, there is an insidious cognitive experience that occurs when we start comparing ourselves to others, and it’s called Social Comparison Bias, which stems from Leon Festinger’s Social comparison theory that states humans have an internal drive for “accurate self-evaluations” (basically we want to know how well or poorly we are doing), and the way that we humans get those self-evaluations is by comparing ourselves to others, across the many domains of our lives (looks, economic status, education, etc). Festinger’s theory was expanded upon by a guy named Willis, who talked about upward and downward comparisons. Willis’ idea is that in order to measure our own success, we look up (for motivation to be better) and we look down (to feel better). This is all well and good if you can, in fact, compare yourself to an Olympian and become inspired. Or, if you can compare yourself to a couch potato and feel good about the three miles you jogged. And, in my case, if you can compare yourself to someone who isn’t as far along in the world of publishing as I am—someone who hasn’t had anything published yet—and feel like you are progressing towards the goal of published author.

On the surface, I was a model post-MFA student; within a year of graduation I was launching a literary anthology, landed in Publisher’s Weekly, and was receiving an offer from an agent. However, these successes were trumped by the failures that came along with them. The anthology, while widely recognized and submitted to, didn’t “take off” as I hoped. My agent and I parted ways and never landed a deal. Within a few short years post MFA, I was sobbing in a therapist’s office, declaring myself a complete and utter failure— a sham of a writer. I took my failure to launch as an author to be a failure as a mother, wife, friend, daughter, teacher, etc.

How did this happen?

Like many writers—and people in general—I spent a lot of time on social media, and all of us are continually bombarded with Facebook posts and Tweets that espouse successes, triumphs, and achievements. This is such a problem that in recent psychology studies, researchers have been able to link Facebook with depression, making this social comparison bias phenomenon a possible cause to mental illness! When we continually see statuses about job promotions, new relationships, and expensive purchases or, in my case, new book deals, we start to compare ourselves to those statuses in unrealistic ways. The bias is the part where now we actually start seeking out information that supports this cognitive distortion that I’m a loser and everyone else is having success!  Thus, when I see the status that so-and-so got a “fantastic” three-book deal, I start to seek out more information about the book deal to either confirm that, in fact, I’m a loser or, the opposite, that they are.

There were times, for a few of those post-MFA years, so-and-so’s new book deal simply drove me to work harder on my craft and on my research of publishers to send my work out to. Unfortunately, more times than not, it made me feel like total crap.

However, I discovered in therapy, this constant comparing, over time, changed the way I thought about myself not just as a writer but also as a mother, wife, friend, teacher. What rendered me so depressed was my thinking and my perception of myself. The comparing myself to others I perceived as more successful, reinforced the thought, I am a failure…at everything and that thought became the lens through which I looked at myself and my world.

Eventually, the healing came in the form a serious commitment to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. By both challenging these thoughts about failure and gathering up concrete factual evidence to both support and refute that statement, I was able to start seeing myself more clearly. I started to examine failure and discovered that I was equating my failures as crimes rather than what they were, simply failures and that failure doesn’t make me a bad a person. A bad person is many things but not someone who simply fails to get a book deal. I also discovered that I was putting my worth into something that is kind of equivalent to winning the lottery: saying “I suck because I don’t have a book deal” is like playing the lottery and saying “I suck each time I don’t win.” You can’t control winning the lottery any more than you can control if someone wants to publish your book. All you can do is play the game.

More importantly, measuring self-worth against anything you cannot control is nothing but playing a losing game.