Last fall, I had thought about suicide probably five times a day.
I had taken a bunch of pills, like, my dad had like his hand at my throat and
all that kind of stuff. I just felt guilty for the people around me.
Imagine a world where everything is perfect. Imagine a world where you can be your best self,
a better self than you may think you actually are. It's a world of double taps, comments, retweets
and shares. Social media has taken the world by storm, with an increasing number of users every
day. Studies show that 71 per cent of Canadians with internet use some form of social media and
the number is expected to grow to 74 per cent in the next four years. And it's no wonder, with apps
like Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat, we can now connect with one another faster than ever before.
Personally, like when I'm just like relaxing at home, it's so much easier just to like talk to
people over social media rather than calling them or going to see them because I'm very introverted,
so I like to be like, in my own space but still communicate with people.
It's something 20-year-old Julia Lloyd says plays a big part of her life.
I was introduced to a lot of people and a lot of new people
and with that social media and constantly like, getting new followers and getting new
all this or if I lost a follower. I had this app where I would see who unfollowed me.
So like, if I had a friend that unfollowed me on Instagram, it would like ruin my day.
It's no wonder we can't put our phones down. In fact, the average person spends two hours
a day on social media. That's five years and seven months in the span of a lifetime.
But what happens when the very tools used to connect us start to tear us apart? For Julia,
social media became an environment so addictive that it drastically impacted her mental health.
Honestly, I think in grade nine was when social media kind of, for me,
took a toll, like grew a lot more because I had a lot more friends, I had a lot more people.
I wanted to like seem cool and all that stuff so that's probably when I started seeing issues with
the whole social media around it. I've seen a lot of girls get ripped on for what they were posting
and I found that like, really upsetting. I think in grade nine, I actually really got introverted
and really like, focused on myself and on school and I didn't really get to know anyone in high
school as much. It was mostly just through social media that I communicated with people.
It was in high school Julia started to notice
her social media addiction was affecting her anxiety levels.
Pretty much, I get anxiety with anything that I see fear in, so it can be
really anything that's subconscious and I don't really know what it could be. Like honestly,
I could wake up one morning and just be super anxious and it could be something that triggered
me in my dream and that's happened a lot. So that was I think when I realized and was
in high school, grade 10/11 when I noticed my mental health had been getting worse.
Nicole Mitchell is a psychotherapist in Toronto who's counseled patients with internet addictions.
She's found that patients who struggle with mental health are
often more susceptible to social media addictions.
We noticed a lot of social anxiety, general anxiety and depression. So people who experience
those kinds of things, it seemed that the internet and social media were kind of
easy ways to distract themselves initially and then it just became a larger problem.
She also says that internet addictions can often mimic the symptoms of drug addictions.
When I was looking into it, some of the the regions in the brain
are similar that are connected with the the use of overusing internet or gaming or any of this stuff,
compared to drug use. People get stuck in a loop. They they can't seem to get out of the use
and you know, people experience similar things to what people experience when you
have any other kind of overuse or addiction. You know, you get irritated when you're not using,
the more that you're offline you're thinking about being online and not being able to set
proper limits for yourself that you you want to go on for maybe an hour just to check everything but
then you end up being in on there for five hours, those kinds of things kind of seem to be trends.
The addiction to social media is one Julia knows all too well.
I was like portraying myself as this like crazy fun person
and like, I started constantly posting photos of me going out.
It was this need to constantly post
about her life that triggered the development of Julia's depression.
If I didn't get as many likes as someone else, I'd feel like depressed or I'd feel like I'm not
good enough and it was a lot more like, I was a lot more critical of myself and a lot more,
I analyzed a lot of things. Like, "Oh, I can only post photos at like five o'clock"
and it was just like, I would think about these things so much and like, it would just make me
go crazy. I think it had to do a lot with like, how I thought of myself, how I perceived myself
and social media I think really made me perceive myself a lot less than I was, which made me
become depressed and not think I was worthy of anyone else's love or attention.
Julia says her relationship with social media spiraled
out of control, to the point where the young university student became suicidal.
My roommate at the time was like "Oh my God" like '"What's going on?" and I would just like,
smoke weed and lay in bed and like, try and just forget everything. It took a while for me like,
I had a few suicide attempts in my apartment with my roommate there.
You don't – you feel like such a bother already to the world, you don't want
to bother the people that you're already around. So it's just like, really difficult
because you have so much love for these people and you have so much like,
appreciation for what they're doing for you but you can't do anything about it and like,
I think that was like the toughest part for me, was watching people watch me suffer when I like,
couldn't change it at that time. Like, I couldn't make a difference like,
on my own. I really needed a lot of like, support and help, so that was probably my lowest point.
Julia's not alone in her experience. A 2015 study by the University of Missouri found that
Facebook specifically could lead to symptoms of depression and isolation. That means that despite
all the clicks likes and shares, social media can actually make us feel lonelier than ever before.
It can feel quite alienating when other people are having, you know, wonderful lives and you're not.
Maybe you're not that busy, maybe people are going out and posting what they're doing and they didn't
invite you. Those kinds of things could arise and make you feel relatively isolated from having fun.
Part of the problem is that the internet is so socially acceptable to use and so is social media.
So if somebody's using cocaine versus using, you know, their social media for 12 hours a day,
people are going to view the cocaine as being really bad,
whereas the social media is so socially acceptable that people don't recognize that it's a problem.
Take Instagram for example, 90 per cent of the app's users are under the age of 35.
Not to mention, it's been rated the worst app for young people's mental health
in a report by the UK's Royal Society for Public Health.
The report also showed that the negative impacts of Instagram are most common amongst women.
For bloggers like Loriana Savo, finding authentic content free of filters and photoshop
is rare and has a huge effect on a person's self-esteem.
I was looking into like, getting my lips done, to be honest, even looking into botox. I'm only 22
but like, little things like that, being on camera because you want to look so perfect.
Even makeup like, just trying to apply tons and tons of makeup before taking a shoot.
You want to look literally like plastic on camera right, because a lot of these people
like Kim Kardashian, even like these girls who are super tall, super skinny,
they almost look not real but they have tons of followers. You know, posting
like, in their bra and underwear and they get tons of likes, tons of comments and I almost tried to
sway into that. I had a lot of shoots done like myself, so in my room like, with my tripod,
taking pictures in like little bralettes but just like, I guess waist up, not so much like, down,
and then try to post it on Instagram to see if I can gain more followers.
When you use a lot of social media, you see everybody's best self and everybody posts the
best pictures of themselves, you know, oftentimes with lots of filters and those kinds of things.
When you look at everybody's feed or in your feed when things are popping up, it's the best
representation of everybody else's life and if your day isn't going that well or your life
isn't going that well, it can certainly affect how you feel about yourself and your life, for sure.
You're 15 years old and you're looking at a girl who's maybe in her 20s and she
has a perfect frame, you know, perfect body, perfect face, perfect makeup,
you look up to that, right. Being only 15, your mental health could be affected in the way that
you don't look like that, so you try to look like that.
The effects of social media can be found in the hallways of today's high schools too.
Students are creating accounts on platforms earlier than ever before. According to high
school student Evan Tudlong, social media is becoming harder to handle, the younger you are.
They can put a lot of pressure on you and I guess it can influence you in a wrong way.
Especially like Twitter and Instagram, there's a lot of negative messages
and I believe that can affect you as a person. So like Instagram,
there can be like, videos of people stealing and everything, you'll be like "Oh, that's so cool."
The 17-year-old soccer player says that social media plays
an important role in his life and his classmates'.
Social media, you don't know it but it takes up a lot of your time.
Whatever you do, you feel like you need to check your Snapchat or Twitter, whatever.
You shouldn't care necessarily what others think or what others will react
to what you do, what you post. I use Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram.
You can communicate with your friends, you can always like, know what's going on.
But Evan says the connectivity of social media has made it easier
for bullies to antagonize people online – something he's seen before.
Social media makes it easier for bullying because it's easier access.
Nowadays, everybody's on social media. You're behind a screen, so it's like kind of cowardly but
that's what that's what bullies are, they're cowards.
Bullying, for example, is easier when the internet is available as opposed to when it wasn't.
That certainly seems to be on the rise since the internet has kind of come along. I think that,
you know, kids can be quite cruel to each other and being
on social media at a young age kind of opens that up a little bit more.
Being a girl and posting a photo of your body and let's say like,
maybe that makes you feel good, good for you. But having other people comment and be like
"Ew, you're like a [ __ ] or "You don't respect your body" or "You're doing this for attention."
A 2013 report shows that amongst teens who reported cyber bullying, 25 per cent of teens
reported having a face-to-face confrontation with someone because of an experience online.
13 per cent reported concern about having to go to school the next day and eight per cent reported
having a physical altercation with someone because of something that took place on a social media
website. But according to Nicole, social media isn't a bad thing and can be used responsibly.
Encouraging the kids to have other interests I think is a really big thing.
That's one of the the biggest things that we work on, is how to have a full life
so that you don't feel the need to live solely on social media or the internet. Have goals in
your life, have interests and hobbies and pursue them, those kinds of things.
So I started playing when I was six years old, house league and then when I was about 10,
I started getting serious and that's when I started rep, playing on a Markham soccer
club. So I've been playing with them for seven years now, currently playing with them right now,
we play in the OYSL, Ontario Youth Soccer League,
and we've won a lot of big tournaments. We've done a lot of showcases.
For Julia, coaching volleyball allows her to not only focus on the sport she loves
but it gives her the opportunity to mentor younger girls and let them learn from her experience.
My volleyball team, my U-15 girls, I would probably jump in front of the bus for them.
I love them to death. I'm gonna get emotional. During second year when I was really suicidal, I
decided I needed to start coaching. First year I wasn't coaching, I was in that phase where I
was like "I don't know what to do." Second year I started to coach and I got involved with Phoenix
and everything and at first like, I was kind of timid with the girls and then I got really, really
close with them and I think my role on the team, yes, skill-wise I developed them with their skill
but I was also there to be their best friend and to be their big sister. Like, they're the
same age as my younger sister so it made it really easy. So when I would have a bad day like, going
to volleyball practice probably made me absolutely like – made me happy because I was doing something
for them. Like, in a way I was benefiting someone else and like, those girls like, the the way
the way they made me feel, the way they would tell me I was like their big sister and like, a lot of
the parents would tell me that like, they wouldn't have played for the team this year if I wasn't
coaching them again. So it's just like, it made me feel really special. One of the girls on the team
actually suffers from depression and general anxiety and she calls me probably once a week
and we talk about it and we discuss ways she can work on it and like, it's just really helpful that
I am helping someone who started off where I was and I can help them not get to where I ended up.
For the Ryerson Documentary Unit, I'm Jessica Valeny.