The Unexpected Health Benefits of Social Media
Those supportive DMs and niche Facebook groups can have a positive impact on your well-being
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In 2016, 39-year-old Arizona resident Laura Willard became ill, but nobody could figure out what was wrong with her. She gasped for air after walking up the stairs, had serious heart issues, and half of her face drooped. Her eyes were red, her muscles twitched nonstop, and all of her joints were swollen and painful. At one point, Willard could barely swallow food.
Dozens of doctors reviewed her case and came up with nothing. As her symptoms progressed, Willard started to do her own online research. It was, she says, a matter of life or death. Eventually, when her ear turned bright red and swelled up, she discovered a posting online about a disease called relapsing polychondritis, which causes your body to attack anything with cartilage in it.
Willard thought she might have this rare disease, so she reached out to more doctors, several of whom agreed that she’d found the right diagnosis. Around the same time, Willard also came across the relapsing polychondritis Facebook group, a community with hundreds of people from around the world suffering from the same thing.
“People in the group, who have since become my real friends, encouraged me not to give up,” she says. “They reassured me that I wasn’t crazy.”
Willard says the Facebook group turned her experience around by giving her social support and new information. These people got it; they knew her experience personally because they were living it, too. “Having a rare disease that my doctors do not even understand is the most isolating feeling I have ever experienced in my 39 years of life,” Willard says. “I cannot ever entertain the idea of leaving Facebook because I could never lose this group. It is a true lifeline for me.”
Social media is known to be related to a bevy of negative outcomes, like rising depression, over-comparison, social anxiety, and perceived isolation. But experts and studies also show that there is a positive benefit that comes from using social media on a daily basis, and that’s social support.
