Interesting article but it relies primarily on people posting on Twitter that they have been diagnosed with depression. I have to wonder how many people with de

Interesting article but it relies primarily on people posting on Twitter that they have been diagnosed with depression. I have to wonder how many people with depression actually do this, and whether this ends up producing a rather unique and self-selected group who’s social media habits may not necessarily represent the “norm”. And this from the introduction seems to be a bit of a simplistic conclusion: > These results suggest that diagnosis and treatment of depression may focus on modifying the timing of activity, reducing rumination, and decreasing social media use at specific hours of the day. I find this odd partly because the three things listed here are “actions” and don’t seem to contribute to “diagnosis”. I assume they meant that late night social media use may be symptomatic of depression but they don’t seem to actually say that (nor does this seem to be a strong conclusion to draw from this particular study?) Secondly, it’s well known that reducing rumination is an effective treatment for depression and that’s one of the things that CBT interventions help to tackle. So this leaves us with “modifying the timing of activity and decreasing social media use at specific hours of the day” (which appear to be the same thing). Now there is likely something in this. Eg Trying to break bad late-night habits of reading social media instead of sleeping, but I’d also argue that this is more of a symptom of depression rather than a cause (though it’s definitely a vicious circle). Perhaps I’ve just got my cynical hat on. I have to admit I haven’t read the entire paper so perhaps it’s just the intro that doesn’t do the best job of summarising the results. (Or I’m not being charitable enough in my reading of it).