Undoubtedly, we are in a mental health crisis as a country that needs a national conversation. Part of this problem is our fixation with social media and the amount of control it has on our lives.
Of course, social media has provided great opportunities for all of us to communicate across borders quickly. It has also reconnected us with family and friends we thought we’d never see again.
The other side of the coin is that social media also opens up a world to our personal spaces, especially those who choose to reveal intimate details of their lives. This entails people displaying positive outlooks about their lives, or pretending to, such as showing how happy they are and how well they are doing materially. These social media behaviours though, I must underscore, take place in one of the most unequal societies in the world in terms of access to socioeconomic opportunities.
The gap between the rich and poor in SA cannot be emphasised. We have an unemployment rate of over 27% in a country that has about 46,000 millionaires, according to the latest New World Wealth report. Like any other stratified community, material possession is the measure of personal progress.
Almost all aspects of society that deal with the human function are all value-based on the material return they bring. The quality of a qualification that one receives is measured by the profession and size of its first monthly salary. Commercial lobbyists and bankers command more respect than nurses and teachers. Social media then becomes the platform where material possession is displayed.
Social media users edit and reconfigure their images and identities to appear more wealthy, beautiful, intelligent, stylish, happy, funny and successful. The attention is fixated on the individual value of “I” above “we”. The barometer used to measure this perceived happiness is the display of crass materialism, which is psychologically compensated by receiving “likes”.
As American social commentator Simon Sinek argues, when a user does not receive many “likes”, they tend to have a bad day filled with anxieties. This kind of an environment breeds toxicity, peer pressure and fierce competition between people. Contrary to popular belief, competition and peer pressure has no age. A 2010 study by the Institute for the Study of Labour revealed it is actually adults who had peer pressure and competition among each another.
They compete about the cars they drive, location and size of their houses, salaries and assets, and the academic performance of their children. They become people embedded in offensively gossiping, bullying, and boastful behaviour.
Among the youth, we might be too late. The impatient urge among the youth to materially succeed in this unequal society breeds resentment, vendettas and jealousy when they see their peers online showing off while they sit at home perceiving their lives to be stagnant.
They regard their inability to show similar images of material possession as a sign of failure or inadequacy. This could be at the centre of the mental health epidemic in higher education, which is breeding youth anger.
The undelivered material possessions of our democracy have severely impacted society’s psycho-social well-being and I’m afraid we might not have strong institutions with the required competencies to urgently and comprehensively deal with this complex problem.
We must begin the task of reconfiguring all our current and upcoming health institutions and practices, such as medical schools and the National Health Insurance, to specifically focus on early preventive strategies that will foresee this epidemic. We also need leadership that will tackle the economic indignity and humiliation of our disfranchised communities.
Above all, we need a listening society that possesses the necessary kindness and care to be generous – and that treats people with respect and love for who they are.
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