Dr. Wendy

This is the video of the interview with Dr. Wendy:

The interview transcript:

would you like to introduce yourself and the work you are doing? 

My name is Wendy, I am a clinical psychologist. I work at Smart Mind Center, and I deal most of the time with children and adults. And I graduated from one of the universities, you know that. 

How long have you been a psychologist? 

I have been a psychologist going three or four years right now, around 2 years are completed, so around 3 to four years now. 

How often do you get patients who are addicted to social media? 

I guess occasionally, there will be parents who come and talk about their children who use social media very often and I suppose you can say like one or two or three a week. 

You have patients who are addicted to social media, So how did you help them get out of their social media addiction?  

Rather than getting out of the social media addiction, it is more of helping them to create a better lifestyle so that they feel more OK about themselves. They feel prouder of themselves. Learning new skills, teaching them new things. Find new activities that they can do rather than social media. Those are some things that I do.  

How bad can social media addiction get? What is the worst case you have ever had about social media addiction? 

In the worst situation, The patient. All they want to do is to use social media again, even when social media is the cause of the things that are making them feel all the negative, the big negative emotions. And in the end, they are using social media, they are making them even worse than they already are. And the cycle continues. 

How does it impact them? Does it do it make them want to suicide or does that not make them depressed or anything? Like what? What terrible things happened to them?  

In most cases, when people are using social media every day, every hour of the day, and they do not do anything else, it is the case in which they might have situations or conditions like depression Anxiety, or a higher level of stress and it does have to involve desire, like one thing to end their life, suicidal thoughts, one thing to just not do anything, one thing to just disappear. It exists, things like those and they feel like ‘I do not want to be here..’ 

if there are patients who are addicted to social media, you would try to cure them, right? So how long does it take to cure social media addiction? Or at least how long does it take for the patient to get better?  

What we say in psychology is not being cured, but why what we say is being better is when there are changes that appear in their behavior. So, it takes around at least a minimum of one month and a maximum of around three months. Sometimes people need to take 3 months before the actual change is seen. And between those weeks, every week, what they take are like little steps to get closer to that change which we can see.

when you want to cure social media addiction, it is slow and usually takes from one month to three months, right?

Not necessarily one month to three months. Sometimes it takes five years in total because when you address social media addiction, so, the cause of the social media addiction is usually something deeper than just using the phone and the behavior itself. So, to actively handle social media addiction, what you need to do is solve the core problems that they are facing and that is the one that takes time. But for them to find other activities other than social media, that might be effective to change in around one or three months, or sometimes in different cases, some might take one year to completely reduce the news of social media to the limit which it is acceptable for them and makes them feel better about themselves. 

what are some causes of social media addiction? 

In the beginning, what is happening is that social media is a part of our life. We wake up. We use our phone, we wake up, we check it, and in the end, it does provide new opportunities. It helps us stay in touch, right? And it allows us to share about ourselves, to know more about people. And these things create a sense of community. It makes us feel closer. It makes us feel a building, a sense of attachment to things around us that are not visible, that are physical physically there. What is happening is that we get more exposed to the things that we do not know are bad for us or good for us. We become scared of missing out. We keep checking our phones. We spend more time on social media. It takes away all our time to do the things that we want to do. Like, for example, we use social media instead of hanging out with our friends, hanging out with our family, learning new skills, right? And so overall, it makes people feel like they are not Good enough. They do not feel satisfied with how they are living. They keep comparing themselves to other people. This is an example that can happen that people spend more and more time using social media because they don't want to miss out on a lot of things they want to find out new information because they want to keep up with the cycle that's going on with their friends and they become constantly distracted and occupied with something that takes up their time by using the social media. And this in turn, sometimes they lose their time to breathe and focus on the things around them. They become more tired of how they think about themselves, how we think about our people, how they feel about themselves, and how they feel about our people. All of these are influenced by what they see and what they hear from social media. This leads them to news increasingly. And that is what causes people to become addicted to social media when they find it difficult to just put their phone down So that, they can take their time to breathe and focus on the things around them. Because there are so many big emotions they feel when they put their phone down, for example, they feel anxious, not good enough, and not proud of themselves. They lose their self as seeing OK and they feel uncomfortable when they are far away from their phone, and they feel angry when their phone is taken away because these people are attached to the media that they can assess to look for information and fulfill their needs to cope with their big emotions. But that way of coping makes them spend more time with the things that are giving them those negative emotions and that is something that could lead to one of the things that leads to social media addiction. 

What are the impacts and effects of social media addiction once you are on social media, how does it impact your life and how do you start to behave and how do you start to act? 

In some cases, you start to lose focus, like you are working on a task, but then occasionally you are checking your phone OK, so the amount of time you need to complete a task becomes longer and you keep feeling like you must keep up with the news. And sometimes you do not hand in tasks on time. That is something that can happen. It makes you compare yourself to other people. So, it makes you feel like, why are they, you know, like they. It makes them feel like they are not as good as the people around them. They feel dissatisfied with their life and they become more stressed, they become less effective in doing their work, and sometimes, social media is also an open network, right? So, it is open to a variety of interactions and activities like, for example, cyberbullying and things like being exposed to information. They are not for their age, and they use it more, which makes them feel less OK about themselves. 

How can social media damage the mental and physical state of people? How does your mental state, how does your physical state change and how can it damage it? 

Because social media, when you look at social media, some when you look at enjoyable content, some of them make you feel happy, you feel fulfilled. And our brain is so Magnificent that it increases, that it produces hormones like dopamine that make us feel happy when we use social media. So, we will be trying to seek things that make us feel happier. And so, that is something that affects us in how social media influences us because we will start to use more social media. After all, that is what is giving us happiness. That is our definition of what happiness is. When the more we do it, sometimes the lonelier we feel because the more we feel disconnected from the people around us that are physically there, like their mom, their dad, their friends, for example, OK? And what that is doing is that our brain is Looking is working in a way that is telling us.

what are some ways we can prevent social media addiction and how can we stop it? 

Some things that you can do is to take time to connect with the people around you. For example, put your phone down for 5 minutes and just chat with your friend next to you about your day, About what you like, about what you don't like, about the things that are troubling you, about the things that you want to do, your goals, things that you want to do, OK and by limiting our time online, for example, if a day you're spending. Say 1 hour scrolling through social media. You want to try and reduce it slowly, like by 10 minutes every week. OK, so if you're using it for 60 minutes this week, then next week try to reduce it to 50 minutes each day, and the next week reduce it to 40 minutes each day and the next week again reduce it to 30 minutes each day until it's at the point where you feel OK, You feel like this is just right, OK. And usually, it is around 30 minutes in so social media. OK, the ideal social media usage is around 30 minutes a day. 

how much social media usage is considered addictive? So, if you are how many hours of social media usage in a day consider you to be addicted to social media? 

In general, addiction to with addiction to social, I mean, you need to see what their work is. If they are students, then if they use their phones to browse social media every day, other than even when they are doing their tasks, other than the time, they are at school, even when they are eating, when they are drinking, when they are doing their work, OK, maybe. And you think when their phone, they get angry at you when they are the phone are not with them, they get anxious and like Moody and throwing tantrums, OK, that is a sign that “hey, that's probably something that is too much worry.”  Usually, people with social media addiction will spend, we'll have their phone next to them every day and be using it with them all the time, and that too much will be considered two in two to four hours, if they are unable to be taken away from them or just put them down for a while, then it might count as addiction. Social media is not determined most of the time, by the hours you spend on your phone or laptop, because these days there are also online classes, right? But what determines social media addiction is your response when your phone is not with you or when the media in which your news to find social media is not present okay, but too much news, too much news will be like more than four hours. 

 Can you explain more about the relationship between social media addiction and dopamine or just addiction in general with dopamine? 

OK, so the thing is, our brain has a lot of hormones, and when we consume an addiction. There are some things that our brain produces that make us behave a certain way or feel a certain way and search for it again, search for it more. For example, if our brain produces dopamine that makes us feel happy, when we do something like scrolling through social media, we are trying to do it repeatedly so that we feel the same happiness. And that is the relation between our brain and dopamine and the behavior we are doing in addiction, OK, because with addiction, addiction is called addiction. After all, we seek it repeatedly. We do it repeatedly because it makes them feel us a certain way that makes us seek it, want it, and do it. And repeatedly. And that's when addiction starts because we start to seek more of the activity we are doing. Because the same amount of things that we are doing no longer gives us the same result, the same amount of happiness. For example, if you use social media for 30 minutes, it makes you happy. But then now 30 minutes is not enough. You want more because you no longer feel happy. So now you use, you spend one hour on social media and that makes you feel the same happiness. And as before when you use 30 minutes. When you spend 30 minutes on social media.  

Why does dopamine increase in the brain because of watching too much social media?

Dopamine does not increase because of watching too much social media. What makes it increase is when we feel happy our happiness, our feelings of being accompanied by something. Or like finding something funny on social media that makes you happy, that makes you laugh sometimes like humor or like a meme, right? And that is the thing that makes our brain produce dopamine because it makes us feel, “Ohh, this is funny.” And that is the link between why the brain produced dopamine because we find entertaining things. We are entertained by the things that we see. We are entertained by the things that we hear. And that is why we look for it more. OK, so that our brain produces more dopamine and makes us feel happy as well.  

What do you think is the most used social media app or platform that most people use? 

I guess sometimes Facebook. Those three, though, there are a lot of platforms. 

is social media addiction as harmful as other types of addictions like for instance drug addiction? 

I suppose you will have to look at this level of severity and harm case by case because it depends on what, where what level of addiction are they at, like how severe are they and how big are the impact of their addictions towards the different areas of their life. So sometimes we need to see it case by case like neither of these is worse than the other, or like better than the other, but we need to see the impact of the addiction itself on the person and the people around them, case by case like that. 

is there any medical treatment for the worst case of social media addiction? If yes, what are the medical treatments?  

Usually as a psychologist, I am not allowed to subscribe to medication, so if they do need medication, what I will do is I would refer them to a psychiatrist for example doctor Lydia whom you have interviewed. Or other psychiatrists that might help me prescribe the medicine suitable for them and help them manage their addiction. They would let me know what they prescribe and how much it does, but then I do not have the power to decide what to be prescribed or how much they have to eat and everything related to it.  

How many people do you think are addicted to social media in the world? 

Last, it was around 2020 when the world's statistics were around more than 6%. So, I suppose it is around more than 182,000,000. Okay, I do not know the exact amount. Okay, and I suppose it is increasing. What I do know is it is increasing daily or yearly, so it should be over 100 million.  

is there anything else you want to add about social media addiction? Like are there some facts we may not know that you can share with us? Or do you want to add anything? 

Some facts about social media addiction are that sometimes social media addiction is a symptom. And what I mean by symptom is it is something that people do to hide their real problems, for example, they do not feel good or like, they do not feel confident about themselves and so all they do is use social media, which leads to social media addiction, right? So, so most of the time social media addiction is not a mental illness, OK, but it is a behavior that people do that is ineffective. To cope with the things that they are dealing with. For example, if they are lonely, they go to social media, they are angry, they go to social media, something like that, OK, but social media addiction itself is not most of the time, it is not the main, the core issue. They are usually there is something beneath it that they are trying to find, that they are trying to fulfill by using social media. 

What we learnt from Ms. Wendy:

Ms. Wendy has been a psychologist for 3-4 years from now. Parents of addicted patients usually come to talk. Dr. Wendy help them by giving them a better lifestyle and activities that distract them from social media. It depends on how long you use social media.

The worst thing that can happen is that they want to use social media everytime. If they use it too much, they start to feel they have no function and get suicidal. SMA usually takes 1-3 Months to cure (In some cases 1 year). We get more exposed to it at the point it's addicting and it also develops FOMO (fear of missing out), FOMO makes you hang out less with friends and then make you feel worthless. Usually, SMA addict gets angry when their phone goes away.

Impacts: Losing focus, having to keep up on new things and comparing other people to you. They become more stressed and due things and watch 18+ videos and see it more until they feel like something is wrong with them. (Example: Porn, Gore, Violence, Etc.)

Ways to prevent/stop SMA are: Put the phone down for 5 minutes and chat to your relatives or friends about things you like. If you reduce it by 1 minute each day you start to feel better.

Usually if they open social media all the time (Usually it would open during eating or study) and gets angry when their phone is taken away. The sign would be getting angry or fearful without phones. 

The most used social media app is instagram and facebook.

SMAs danger depends on severity. It depends on what level it is on, It either could be as deadly as porn or drug addiction or not as deadly. 2021 Had 116 million addicted people.

Facts:
Sometimes SMA is a symptom for example they don't feel good or feel insecure, It isn't always a mental disorder.

Pictures from the Interview: