Data Visualization

The Social Media Reality: A Mentally Depressing One?

by jme00 | Apr 6, 2024 | Uncategorized

My Teenage Years

Throughout my childhood and teenage years, social media played a pivotal role in my life. It controlled how I think, what I do, and who I am friends with. I felt depressed and did not know why or how to stop it. As a young teenager, I wanted to prove my independence, which is why I decided to take matters into my own hands. That is when I realized social media is somehow linked to the feelings I am getting, and this was when I decided to change my lifestyle and approach towards it. Over the past 10 years, I have been able to take control of my life, by decreasing social media usage and taking control over it, and in this post, I will be showing you how.

Mental Health and Depression

Mental health is something that, at one point in history, was not discussed enough and was seen as a stigma. Today, mental health is highlighted more than ever before. Specifically, disorders such as depression are more accepted in our societies.

That being said, studies show that depression has been at its highest since 2015 among US citizens[1]. Not only that, but another alarming fact is that “About 7 out of every hundred men and 1 out of every hundred women who have been diagnosed with depression in their lifetime will go on to complete suicide. The risk of suicide in people with major depression is about 20 times that of the general population.” [2]

This begs the question: What is causing this drastic change?

The Big Question

Looking at a survey conducted for over 450 people, we can see that more than 40% of those people spend more than 15% of their day on social media. The average person sleeps around 8 hours. So more realistically, those people spend 25% of their time awake on social media.

So, the real question becomes:

How significant is the effect of social media on consumers’ mental health, and more specifically, on causing depression?

What I was Feeling is Real

As it is evident in the below visualization, people who spend more time on social media reported a 43%, very frequent level of depression, compared to 2% for people who spend less than 1 hour on social media (And there is a clear distinction, with an upward trend, from one “Time Spent” category to the other). This raises a red flag; more than 40% of the people used social media for more than 4 hours, and on average, more than 50% of those people have reported frequent/very frequent depression. Although this is a sample of more than 400 people, imagine the world population scenario!

Not only that, but research and evidence show that people in the age category of 18 to 24 have been identified to be the most depressed among all age groups. Something that is crystal clear in visualization 3.

The Simple Solution: Decrease your social media time!

But as a user who was once stuck in the loop, I can definitely say that it’s not that simple, is it?

The Realistic Solution

In reality, you need to build the right habits, over time. Nothing happens overnight, which is why most people try and fail time and time again. The process took me 10 years! Now that might be a long period and this might vary from person to person but some caviats and lessons learned lead me to come up with the following set of recommendations:

1. Keep Social Media out of the bedroom: Most people sleep with a phone in their hand and wake up to instagram reels. What you need to do is not let social media be the last thing you think of before you sleep and as soon as you wake up, because how you sleep and wake up shapes how your night and day flow.
2. Don’t mindlessly scroll: Whenever you feel like you are about to open TikTok and start scrolling for no reason, take a deep breath, pause, and think. Don’t let your inner social media addict take over.
3. Go out for walks without your phone: Going out without thinking about what is happening on your feed allows you to relax and think about your real world concerns.
4. Monitor your screen time: Most social media apps allow you to do so, and you should. This helps you realize how much you’ve spent and allows you to incrementally decrease the time you spend until you are no longer a 4+ hours spender.

My Final Thoughts:

Take it from someone who walked the walk, losing your social media dependency, decreasing your depression, and consequently living a better life is not a one day journey. It’s a long, bumpy one. Yet, the outcome is definitely a positive one. So start today, and you will reap the benefits.

Resources: 

1. Gallup. “Depression Rates Reach New Highs.” Gallup.com, 15 Oct. 2020, https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-new-highs.aspx.
2. Fact Sheet: Some Facts About Suicide and Depression.” Connecticut General Assembly, n.d., https://www.cga.ct.gov/asaferconnecticut/tmy/0129/Some%20Facts%20About%20Suicide%20and%20Depression%20-%20Article.pdf.
3. “Prevalence of Depression and Anxiety Symptoms – United States, 2019–2020.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 18 June 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7224a1.htm#:~:text=The%20age%2Dstandardized%20prevalence%20of%20depression%20among%20U.S.%20adults%20was,%E2%89%A565%20years%20(14.2%25).

Population Clusters and Housing Deficit in Jordan

by awa00 | Apr 4, 2024 | Uncategorized

“Urbanization” is a problem that many countries suffer from. It led to drastic demographic changes that led to negative effects in terms of political , social , and economical aspects. Many governments struggle to solve the issue of high density populated area and find ways to shift this density to the skirts of cities in order to decrease stress on resources within the city bounds.

Jordan , is one of these countries who struggled with multiple refugees waves due to political instability in neighboring countries , started in 1948, then 1967 , 1990, 2003, and 2011 . in all of these waves the government was not ready to absorb the impact of sudden increase in population , especially in major cities like Amman, Irbid and Al Zarqa, which led to an increasing housing deficit in the past decades.

This sudden increase in population and the housing deficit is one of key factors in harming the social context of any community, we can realize that from crime rate increase in the same period of time.

Government Role

Jordanian government contributed in providing households since 1965 by initiating multiple institutions such as General Corporation for Housing and Urban Development (HUDC), Housing Bank and many saving funds . in 1996 the government issues the Housing Sector Restructuring Project which succeeded in providing housing units across the country and according to population growth in different cities. Unfortunately these efforts was stopped in 2010 and substituted to supporting demand instead of supporting supply, the HUDC role was shrink to providing empty land slots with minimum infrastructure, which created many vacant underdeveloped projects around the Jordanian cities.

Government contribution in supplying housing units dropped to 1%, which led to sudden increase in deficit by more than 45,000 units , ( 6 million square meters of apartments , of an average 130 sqm per apartment ) . Most of government contribution was directed to low-income sector, which the private sector did not focused on. In 2018 private sector contributed in 31% only of the housing deficit in declination than 2016 were it contributed in 54% of the deficit.

Housing Distribution

Housing distribution is a major indicator on how the government is responding to housing deficit and population increase, according to data from Department of Statistics ( DOS ) 61% of housing construction is concentrated in only three Major cities ( Amman, Irbid, Al Zarqa) , 45% are in Amman alone ( 1,072,559 house ) . This emphasize the gap between the capital and other cities , in a look on the housing distribution map we can see the unequal distribution of housing between different Governates.

New Urban Clusters

As a solution to unequal distribution of housing across a country , many governments focused on creating Urban clusters outside major cities , either to absorb population density or to decrease stress on infrastructure and facilities , a good example on that is the Malaysian case study. The government of Malaysia developed a 20 year plan which was updated every five year , The government was involved in providing incentives on both sides ( supply & demand ) It created houses for low income families in partnership with private sector by creating urban clusters with full services ( fire & rescue , libraries, information services, broadcasting, sports and cultural facilities ) as well as family and community centers in order to improve general well-being of the people.(1)

Recommendations

It is important to Jordan to initiate Housing programs on a national level which collect data that helps in forecasts for housing demand , and to fulfil this demand through Private Public Partnerships Projects that target low-income housing especially in governates outside Amman , Irbid & Zarqa.