The Impact of Social Media on Depression Among Young Adults

Undergraduate #322
Discipline: Mathematics and Statistics
Subcategory: Mathematics and Statistics
Session: 2
Room: Exhibit Hall A

Lucero Urbieta - Arizona State University
Co-Author(s): Kaeleen Boggs, Grand Canyon University, AZ

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Depression is defined as a serious mental health disorder that can cause serious symptoms affecting daily activities such as eating, sleeping, and working. In 2017, nearly 4.4 million young adults aging 18-25 years old had a major depressive episode in the past year. Recent studies estimated that nearly 90% of young adults check their social media at least once a day. Research has also shown that the use of social media contributed to the recent increase of depression episodes among teens and young adults. Furthermore, depression has also contributed to the economic burden in the United States costing approximately an estimated 187 million dollars. Thus, there is an urgency to identify effective effort to minimize the depression epidemic amount the teens and young adults. We present a mathematical model to study the impact of different control strategies on the dynamics of depression transmission among teens and young adults caused by social media. In the model, teens and young adults, social media users are divided into five compartments: susceptible, users going through low depression, moderate depression, severe depression, and effectively-treated depressed users. From the mathematical analysis of the model, the depression-generating number, RD, is identified. The model shows to have a locally and globally-asymptotically stable depression-free equilibrium whenever RD is less than unity. The public health implication of these results is that the number of depression cases can be effectively controlled. On the other hand, the number of depression cases will reach the depression-persistent equilibrium whenever RD is greater than unity indicating the presence of a depression epidemic. We further investigate the effectiveness of various control strategies consisting of treatment for depression, self-motivated counseling, public health counseling, and a hybrid of these methods. Numerical simulations of the model reveal that public health counseling and the hybrid control strategy are the most efficient in controlling the number of depression cases among teens and young adults. To further investigate the depression epidemics, further research will consider the influence of self-initiating depression cases and how they contribute to each depression group. We will also consider the events of relapse of effectively-treated depressed users.

Funder Acknowledgement(s): National Science Foundation HBCU-UP research Initiation Award (grand 074754805)

Faculty Advisor: Aprillya Lanz, leata@asu.edu

Role: This was my first experience with research. At the time it was quite the journey, but I learned so much during the summer research program. My partner and I split almost everything in the research project 50/50. I worked out a lot of the mathematical analysis consisting of depression-free equilibrium, global stability of depression-free equilibrium, numerical analysis, sensitivity analysis, wrote part of the report, and I did the majority of the making the poster and presentation. I had assistance in everything I did, my partner and I worked together on everything.