When social media hurts: a nine-month prospective study on self- blame as a mediator between problematic social media use and suicidal ideation in adolescents

Abstract

The increasing prevalence of problematic social media use (PSMU) has heightened concerns about its adverse impact on social media users’ mental health, and specifically on suicidality. Despite reviews investigating the associations between PSMU, emotion regulation, and suicidality, there is a lack of understanding of the potential role that specific emotion regulation might play. This study aimed to bridge this gap by examining the mediating role of four specific maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies (CERS) (i.e., rumination, self-blame, other-blame, catastrophizing) in the prospective link between PSMU and suicidal ideation in a sample of 517 adolescents (M = 13.41, SD = 1.06). The results showed that PSMU was significantly associated with suicidal ideation nine months after its assessment. Maladaptive CERS were negatively associated with both PSMU and suicidal ideation, with the exception of other-blame, which was not significantly related to PSMU. The findings of mediation analyses indicated that only self-blame mediates the negative and prospective link between PSMU and suicidal ideation. Specifically, those adolescents who present PSMU were found to exhibit a higher level of self-blame, which, in turn, contributed to greater suicidal ideation nine months later. These findings reinforce the notion that not only might PSMU be a risk factor for suicide in adolescence, but also that efforts should focus on identifying such adolescents and on helping them to reduce self-blame. The implications of this study for the prevention of suicidal ideation associated with PSMU in adolescents are discussed.