Media hysteria is what links the Internet to depression

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It used to be that if you were depressed you’d cry in front of the fire, lay around watching TV, or sit soaking-up suds at the bar around the corner.  But if you believe news reports about research out of Leeds University published in the journal Psychopathology today’s depressed are spending their time online.

The media has been all over this story: BBC News has a headline “‘Internet addiction’ linked to depression, says study,” Reuters shouts “Study links excessive Internet use to depression,”  Time magazine’s Health & Science blog trumpets “Too much time online linked with depression risk,” and the Daily Mail repeats the BBC headline while the UK Press Association opts for the pithy “Internet use linked to depression.”

The stories themselves state, for example, “(a) ‘dark side’ to the internet suggests a strong link between time spent surfing the web and depression, say psychologists.” (UKPA). Or that “(p)eople who spend a lot of time surfing the internet are more likely to show signs of depression, British scientists said on Wednesday.” (Reuters)

But don’t rush to take an Internet-break right now, nor do you need to do an intervention with that friend who just always seems to be on Facebook. First, the reported link is between depression and compulsive Internet-use, not Internet-use. Keep in mind that there is a link between compulsive hand washing and depression, but that is no reason to question normal hygene.

Second, and more important, the implications of the actual research are much less dire than the media response would suggest. Other than arguing the political point (yes, there are politics even in research!) that “Internet Addiction” should be included as a distinct disorder in the upcoming DSM V diagnostic manual, this research says nothing more alarming than depressed people will do depressing things even when they are online, like spend too much on “sexually gratifying websites, gaming websites and online community/chat websites” (Abstract: “The Relationship between Excessive Internet Use and Depression: A Questionnaire-Based Study of 1,319 Young People and Adults“)

So lets look at the actual research that has generated the media hysteria.

The researchers recruited subjects online using links to the research questionnaire placed on UK-based social networking sites. 1319 completed the questionnaire that surveyed patterns of Internet use and levels of depression. No data is provided about how many people viewed the questionnaire without replying, nor how many started but did not finish, but I think it safe to assume that many, many more people viewed the link than those who chose to participate. We have to ask who would choose to participate and are they a representative sample of the rest of us. Well, in this design only those already bored by or uninterested enough in what they were doing online would bother to take the time to participate. So right from the start we see the study is based on a highly biased and not a representative subject pool.

Moreover, if the researchers want to study people who are compulsive users of sex sites, gambling sites, and social networking sites why would they think these compulsive users would stop what they are compulsively drawn to do to complete a questionnaire. Won’t their method of an online questionnaire miss the very people they want to study? Rather than the people of interest, their research design pulls for people who spend lots of time online and are already sorta uninterested and bored (depressed?) by what they are doing. Of course, and I am not imputing any motive here, this group consists of  the very people who would support the researchers agenda of advocating for inclusion of the “Internet Addiction” diagnosis because the members of this group are already dissatisfied with what they are doing online (depressed?).

They found 18 users (1.2%) who showed a pattern of compulsive and excessive use of specific sites, but not so compulsive that they don’t mind an interruption. They called this group “Internet Addicted.” Out of the 1319 looking for something to do online they also found 18 normal users who were demographically similar to the “Internet Addicted” 18. They then compared them on how much time was spent online, what people did online, and how depressed they were.

Those 18 compulsive users not so addicted that they won’t interrupt their addiction for science did in fact spend more time online and were more depressed.

This is not surprising. Imagine an offline version. You leave a questionaire at a bar, a nice bar, a place people go to hang out and be with their friends and maybe meet some new friends. At any one time in this bar, lets say on any one night it holds 100 people, do you think it likely to find 1 or 2 people who drink way too much in bars, so much so that it interferes with their life? Do you think it likely they would also tend to be more depressed than other people at the bar? Would you be surprised by that? Would you then want to see headlines splashed that there is a link between bars and depression?

It would be really easy to sink deeper into snark (don’t get me started on the statistics they used). But I won’t because what I really want to do is make the point that we really do not know what our emerging culture of simulation is doing to us, either how it makes life better for some while for susceptible others going online becomes an occasion for suffering, isolation, and depression. But we really want to know. And we want to know now even though we don’t know, not yet. Change happens faster than research gets done. And media outlets just won’t plaster headlines announcing “Nothing Conclusive” or “We Still Don’t Know.”  And while this study deserved to be done, we need lots of data-points even to begin understanding what the tools we’ve made are doing to us, it did not deserve all the media attention it has received.