I think it's not only depression but also general "discomfort" that comes often with increased inflammation. You feel bad - you turn to people around you for support/distraction. So it would be interesting to see "if people seek communication" online and offline. Offline would be harder to quantify though

would also add this research direction: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24331897/

Mental stress releases CRP, so I suspect inflammation isn't causing anything here, just a marker.

Or is it a proxy?

Suppose X causes inflammation and social media use.

Suppose you want to reduce social media use.

You look at this study and think I should reduce inflammation, so I can reduce social media use? How do I do that? By removing causes of inflammation.

The thing to be careful about is to avoid jumping to some medication or surgery that directly removes inflammation, and be sure to eliminate something that causes inflammation.

I think we just need to ask: what are the most common causes of this type of inflammation? Probably depression, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. So, the options are:

- inactive people use social media more, and the inactivity causes inflammation due to heart disease / diabetes - depression causes inflammation, and depressed people use social media more - social media causes depression, which causes inflammation

>Mental stress releases CRP

The body is full of these chicken-egg relationships. It really is a gigantic and bewildering system of positive and negative feedback loops (in terms of effect, not value judgements). Mental stress is one trigger, sure, but if you accept my interpretations below it is not much of a leap to see that CRP can also lead to significant increases in mental stress.

I think it would be more accurate to say inflammation isn't the primary underlying cause but is rather an adaptive response gone awry. However, once triggered, inflammation (and it's downstream effects) can have a significant influence on one's subjective experience and behavior, by way of physiological alterations to brain chemistry and function.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6658985/

>Increased inflammation is seen in the periphery in both depression and fatigue. This inflammation leads to increased permeability of the BBB,* allowing for easier entry of inflammatory molecules or immune cells into the CNS.

If you happen to have a disruption/disorder of your microbiome that includes loosening of the tight junctions of your epithelium (aka intestinal permeability aka "leaky gut"), that means that cytotoxic byproducts of bacterial metabolism and your body's immune responses to their presence (eg Mast cell release of histamine, heparin, cytokines, chemokines, etc) can enter your bloodstream and then cross your BBB to get into your brain.

I believe that inflammation plays a role in each of these three steps: loosening of the tight junctions in epithelium, release of chemical mediators by mast cells (eg in response to detection of cytokines, rather than strictly in the presence of allergens and toxins), and increasing the permeability of the blood brain barrier.

The chemokines are particularly concerning:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11786310/

>Chemokines in the brain have been recognised as essential elements in neurodegenerative diseases and related neuroinflammation.

Fun times!

It’s reasonable to say that the causal relationship between the mind and the body (if we treat them as distinct at all!) is fundamentally undetermined, and attacking inflammation issues from both mental and physiological wellbeing angles is worthwhile.

For example, it may be possible to say that inflammation correlates with mental stress, but given lifestyle choices made under mental stress (such as your diet and so on) are also what causes or at least contributes to that inflammation it’s dubious whether we can completely untangle the two and definitively prove that the causal arrow does not, in fact, point in the counter-intuitive (from physicalist perspective) direction.

Inflammation can be rather subtle. Someone ostensibly unaffected could have a load of biomarkers of inflammation, and it's associated with all sorts of odd and bad stuff. This is a strange study, perhaps the press release is just dodgy and the paper is easier to understand.

is there any research linking this with alcoholism / smoking / other shortsighted comforts?

Add "desire for anonymity" to that list of symptoms. A recent survey (1) found that "because I'm afraid of crazy people tracking me down" to be in the top 3 reasons for preferring anonymity on social media.

Consider that. A whole population afraid of each other. That's some kind of epidemic.

1) https://lemm.ee/post/4655237

Seems like "a desire to be publicly accessible at all times" is the outlier as far as history goes, surely. Social media use isn't exactly a known positive indicator :b.

>"desire to be publicly accessible at all times"

Is this a variety of FOMO?

(Fear of missing out).

I hear that's a big thing now.

And of course there's the employee version of that too. Where boss can talk to you 24-7. I don't know what the name for that is.

It's a kind of massive force for unsolitude.

Eh kinda. FOMO is more about things like ‘I didn’t get rich like everyone else did.’.

The boss thing is as often about trying to avoid negative consequences/staying in control of an interaction.

If you’re always available to your boss, it’s harder for them to blame you for something not working (because you weren’t there to walk them through it at 2am).

If you respond to a negative social media post before everyone else reads it, you have a better chance in getting ahead of a shitstorm, etc.

expression without accountability

A big manifestation of that is quoting. You see a lot of that in some scenes. Whole discussions where nobody issues a personal opinion. Only copy-pasting authoritative utterances.

And if you ask for an interpretation of one of those quotes they get evasive.

I was going to suggest, is it the person's workout that's causing inflammation? Or the need to go tell everyone about it on social media. I'm not sure this study accounted for this.

The researcher looked at depression in their 2022 paper, it was not statistically significant, agreed it's odd they didn't mention.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8864418/