Impact of Media Depictions on Well-Being and Mental Health

Abstract

This is a comparative study aimed at determining the extent to which media impacts the body image, self-esteem and anxiety-depression of girls and boys. The media has been found to be the most powerful conveyor of socio-cultural values regarding body ideals, size and weight. Nowadays people feel increasingly pressured by the media about their bodies. Today young people are greatly exposed to countless media images and they start to compare themselves with all those highly edited images which in turn lead to depression, low self-esteem. Media validation of own photos from other social media users may falsely fulfil the need for acceptance. At the same time bodies of girls depicted in media have become thinner and for boys it has become more of muscular. The negative feelings associated with and its impacts on the well-being, self-esteem of individuals constitute the core focus of the paper. Three tools were used for data collection (Rosenberg’s Self-esteem scale, MTUAS and Beck’s depression and anxiety inventory). These are standardized tools. A quantitative non-experimental independent t-test design was used. Data from these questionnaires was analysed using SPSS. The analysis revealed that there is no significant impact of higher usage of social media on self-esteem and anxiety-depression of males and females.