"Escapism is the avoidance of unpleasant, boring, arduous, scary, or banal aspects of daily life. It can also be used as a term to define the actions people take to help relieve persisting feelings of depression or general sadness."
My mom walked into my room while I was in a perfectly fine mood and sitting there shitting around on the internet for about 3 hours already. She started yelling at me that it's the internet that can caused my depressive moods. She said something about a study that showed her point but failed to really show it to me and failed to have an statistics. This entire thing is written because of this.
Going online for depressed teens is a form of escapism. We go on it for long periods of times for escape the overwhelming feelings that depression can cause and it can help very much. The study said that excessive use can lead to distortion of the mind as we hormonal and overly-emotional teens use our excessive empathy to let us be angered, saddened, or controlled by what we're watching. While too much use can lead to a big downward slope is true, it's not what we're necessarily watching but the idea that by 5 hours in we've run out of things to watch thus we can't escape anymore.
People without depression can't possibly understand how absolutely overwhelming and dreadful depression can be. They can try but it's extremely hard for them to quite get it. They can, however, know the symptoms. Depression often leads to different forms of escapism. Whether that be drugs, alcohol, the internet, art, music, or some other distraction. It only does because those with depression want to escape the tyranny of the mental illness.
Like a drug addict, once we're all out of our addiction-in this case online media, we return back into the state we were in before we distracted ourselves and even feels stronger. Why is this? Well, because it's like an addiction. We get dopamine flowing but it stops as soon as we run out of what we want to see. Thus, the serotonin that causes depression also depletes because dopamine and serotonin go hand in hand. You need to feel pretty good to function, right? Well, once we've run out of things to distract us and make us feel that high, we go down hard. With the depression, even harder. We feel like shit because the high is gone.
My point is not that the internet isn't entirely at fault, too much time on it can hurt, but instead of blaming the content blame the effects of the excessive use. Blame why it happens rather than what happens. Tech can be a very good coping method for many people suffering from depression. The ideas of the study can be true for some people but all depressed teens. Teens are that stupid.
Even if you were to believe what the study said, how about instead of saying it, you actually help your damn kid find something that could interest them and not hurt them or give them negative ideas. Ain't that a fucking thought?
