Mental disorders, impact of event and psychological well-being based on the source and duration of social media during the corona pandemic

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Master of Personality Psychology, Azad Eslamic University, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic has caused crises affecting the mental health of the people. In addition, in any social crisis, people often seek out information about the event to be aware of what is happening. The aim of this study is the comparison of mental health problems according to the type of social media exposure and also the duration of its use at the time of corona pandemic. The population of the study was all men and women ranging from 15 to 60 years old in the whole country who participated in the study voluntarily and included a total of 656 participants. To this aim, Mental Health Questionnaire, the Psychological Well-Being Scale, the Impact of Event Scale, the Yale-Brown OCD Scale, and the researcher-made questionnaire on the duration and source of social media were employed. The type of media that people used to follow the news showed a significant difference on psychological well-being, impact of event, anxiety and depression. On the other hand, follow-up time can cause differences in anxiety, stress and psychological well-being between groups. The interaction between duration factor and source type only caused differences in depression, anxiety, and psychological well-being. It should be noted that the prevalence of mental disorders does not show a significant difference, except for stress, which shows a doubling of growth. The interaction of the type of media and the duration of following the news from those media can cause mental health problems and reduce psychological well-being because unreliable social media creates a lot of ambiguity that increases anxiety and stress and the impact of events such as corona pandemic.

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