Social Media Affects Mental Health * Social media can affect many parts of the mental health. One part is self-perception- how we think about ourselves. The pressures that people put on themselves to get approval from other are huge. It can make people depressed when they don’t get all the likes. The pressures of taking the right picture, with the right filter, wearing the right outfit, at the right place, with the right people is unnecessary pressure. * Smiling depression is a term used to describe people who are depressed but do not appear to be. It is a depression that’s becoming more and more common these days. 6.7 percent of the population over the age of 18 suffer from it. Social media can be one of the major causes of this depression. People always want to seem happy to everyone. They care so much about their self-image they lost care on how they are really feeling. We all get that sadness, that pain when we see on Snapchat or other social Medias our friends having fun without us. We want to appear to be happy and appear to be doing other things but we are truly sad inside. Social media covers up your original self. The ideal self is the self we aspire to be. Carl Rogers’s theory of personality is that everyone has an idea of whom and what they want to be. With social media we can create the person that we want to be and how we want to be seen as. The problem with this is that once the cyber “you” that you have created is gone you’re left with the original you and people don’t like that. People are starting to lose sight in between what’s real and what’s not. Social media has taught us to silence what we are really feeling because we are afraid of what other might think. We are being fooled into believing that other lives are so much better because no one is going to post the negative traits that they have or the bad pictures they have. We need to