The claim: after a single study (which we reported on back in May), computer scientists now know how people with depression spend time online.
From that knowledge, the researchers suggest we could design some sort of intrusive, spying app on your computer, iPad or smartphone to let you (or Big Brother, in whatever form — college administrators, your parents, or big data mining companies working for advertisers) know when you’re surfing in a “depressive” pattern.
Are the researchers over-generalizing from their data, or do we really know how people use the Internet when they’re depressed?
Let’s find out…
As we explore this article, keep in mind that researchers’ conflict of interest in writing up their results for the mainstream media is a very real one. They will help forward their academic careers and professional reputation by having such a write-up appear in a prestigious newspaper such as the New York Times. ((It’s never clear to me why a news organization like the New York Times is okay with letting researchers — who have an intrinsic conflict of interest — write up the findings of their own study and then publish the write-up. I guess they rationalize it by putting it in the Opinion pages, as though people reading the article online will note and appreciate the differentiation.)) Such a write-up won’t help as much if the researchers aren’t brazen and absolute in their conclusions.
And yet, we need researchers to explain the complexities of their data and be cautious when generalizing their results. Especially when they’re explaining their results in a regular newspaper (as opposed to a journal article). (Especially when other non-scientists will simply uncritically repeat the finding as though it were fact, because it appeared in the New York Times.)
The researchers found that a small group of college students who scored highly on a single measure of depression — not people who’ve actually ever been diagnosed with depression — appear to like to download more music, movies, and file-sharing, and seem to email others more often than those who didn’t score as highly. “Other characteristic features of “depressive” Internet behavior included increased amounts of video watching, gaming and chatting” and switching between online tasks more often than non-depressed individuals.
Previous research from 11 years ago had found similar results correlating loneliness (not specifically depression, though) with increased email use. It’s also not really surprising to learn that people who are depressed like to watch more TV — or the Internet equivalent of it today, downloading more movies.
People Use Facebook? Smartphones?
But it’s important to also note what this study did not measure — social network and social media use, as well as mobile phone use and texting. After all, I’m sure college students are using Facebook, Twitter and their smartphones to keep in touch with their friends more than they use email.
The lack of specific mention or monitoring of these popular and widely used technology platforms is a significant hole in the researchers’ data. It means the researchers are describing only what they can measure. We’re completely in the dark about technologies they didn’t measure yet are widely used.
Think of it this way… What if researchers only had access to magazine subscriptions of a group of people, but no access to their newspaper subscriptions or TV viewing habits? The researchers could tell us all about their magazine reading habits, but leave out what most people are actually doing — watching TV and reading newspapers.
Convenience Sample — Not a Randomized, Representative Sample
Another problem is that the subjects they used to conduct their study is not randomized nor representative. Taking 216 undergraduate college students from a single university campus is not robust methodology. It’s called a “convenience sample” and is usually done in exploratory or pilot studies in psychology. Worse is that only 28 students of their sample — a tiny 13 percent — were female.
At the onset of the study, a surprising 30 percent of the students met research criteria for depression (specifically, they scored a 16 or higher on the CES-D). That’s a big number, and suggests that their sample had an inordinate amount of depressed students in it. It’s also nearly twice the rate of depression as measured in the 23,000+ students who responded to the National College Health Assessment. ((http://www.acha-ncha.org/data/PHYSMENTALF06.html))
Big Brother Knows When You Are Sad
The researchers, based upon this single study, are “currently attempting to build a classifier to proactively discover depressive symptoms among students by passive, unobtrusive and run-time monitoring of their Internet usage.”
How “unobtrusive” will it be when someone from the university counseling center comes knocking on your door to inquire about your “depressive” Internet use? What is the rate of false-positives?
And are the researchers really at a stage of development in their research — before it’s been replicated on a single additional college campus — that ensures what they’ve identified is actually a “depressed” pattern of Internet use? What if a dozen other mental disorders exhibit similar Internet patterns? What if it’s college stress, which simply surfaced as higher CES-D scores in this study? What if it’s a male-only phenomenon?
So many questions remain, yet the researchers — computer scientists, not psychologists — feel certain they are on the right path to a new mental health intervention.
In sum, the headline could be more accurately reflected as: How a Small Group of Depressed Male College Students Who Are Not Representative of College Students in General Use the Internet at a Single Campus at a Missouri University.
Not quite as sexy or eye-catching.
Read the full article: How Depressives Surf the Web ((This is a pretty offensive headline, too, although not the writers’ fault. Calling a person who has clinical depression a “depressive” is a depressing reminder of the stigma and short-hand taken by people who don’t appreciate that a person is not defined solely by whatever medical or mental health condition they may have.))
Read the study: Associating Depressive Symptoms in College Students with Internet Usage Using Real Internet Data (PDF)
4 comments
They are not far off – gaging from my own depressive patterns of internet use. I do play facebook games almost endlessly – moving from one to another, I do check emails obsessively. When I’m feeling less depressed – like now then I stop playing the games, I don’t do the email thing quite so often, although I’m in business so I keep up on it – but that’s for different reasons. When I am in a major depressive funk I come to the computer to escape. It’s a mindless activity that keeps me from dealing with things.
But, that’s just my experience.
Got to love when these “academic” types come out with a new way to state the obvious and well known. The mind’s ultimate goal for any conscious painful thought is repression. Distraction is one of the minds most useful tools to aid repression. Allocating consciousness to shallow, trivial, non-threatening tasks is space and time not being allocated to an unresolvable threat to nutrition, warmth, or security. This allows for a threat to be buried in the subconscious. Antidepressants work by demising the minds ability to have deep conscious thoughts and allows them to seek only shallow temporary fulfillment. Thus the common side affects such as loss of libido (which requires trust and passion), gain of weight (a result of unchecked eating) and of course suicidal thoughts (when you don’t have to consider who else it will hurt, suicide becomes easier)are the result of SSRI/SNRI’s and the like. Look down the list of “manic behavior” and you will see a list of shallow, unsustainable, and selfish behaviors. Depressed people who are able to appease themselves for short periods of time without being hindered by that nagging issue that drives their depression are called “bipolar”.
But all this was theorized by Freud, Jung, and the like and confirmed by Skinner, Stephenson, and Pavlov. Yet these snake oils salesmen love to put their spin on it and push their latest gimmick. Remember when lobotomies were cool?
Very well done and nicely argued. But as an academic there appears to me to be one thing that is slightly wrong. In the academic world in general having your work reported in newspapers does not bring you credit. In my experience as a senior academic it primarily makes your colleagues suspicious, and as a member of a search committe for a lectureship or chair this would make me think twice about the applicant. It’s not as bad as *publishing* a newspaper article; unless you’re of the status of Steven Pinker or Richard Dawkins, that could be a definite black mark on your CV.
Sound points! Yet another reason cyber-surveillance of mood might be silly is that(mild)depression can actually be useful, even though it is unpleasant. Like many (but not all) trait evolution has given us, it may be there for a very good reason. Depression may tell us something is wrong in our lives, people using the net more might be looking for new possibilities/solutions.
As a bi-polar artist I find my very best art is done when I am moderately(not severely)depressed, I try out desperately radical possibilities when depressed. Most people imagine I must be at my most creative when manic, not so, I tend to think anything I do is just wonderful when euphoric & accordingly produce rubbish, even though it feels fantastic.
It’s true community has largely died because of media, there might have been a time when a neighbor
might have notice you where behaving oddly & cared a toss, less likely today. I personally think it would be better to think about reviving local community than trying to find totalitarian ways for media to substitute for it, I’m guessing this will probably happen anyway the way things are going, with non-renewable resources needed for high-tech running out etc.
Cheers