Social Media and Schizophrenia: A Review

Social media has become a cornerstone of society in the 21st Century, with billions of users around the world logging on to platforms each day. Due to social media’s rise to ubiquity, modern literature has examined countless facets of the technology, including but not limited to its relationship with psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia. This review examines the extant research pertaining to social media and schizophrenia. Research demonstrates that social media offers both benefits and drawbacks to individuals dealing with schizophrenia. Social media can provide individuals with schizophrenia with communities they can relate to and aid with social interaction. Additionally, social media offers benefits by allowing clinicians to identify individuals with schizophrenia without physical interaction through individuals with schizophrenia’s unique posting patterns. However, social media users with schizophrenia may also be negatively exposed to stigmatizing or unreliable information regarding their disorder. Social media can also serve as a means of treatment, as initiatives such as Horyzons, MOMENTUM, EMBRACE, and PRIME have modeled their treatment of schizophrenia based on social media’s structure. These initiatives have garnered hope that social media can be harnessed to treat conditions such as schizophrenia and improve the quality of life of individuals dealing with schizophrenia. Overall, this paper offers an overview of current literature on social media and schizophrenia that can be used to inform future prevention and intervention efforts.