Role of inflammation in depression: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6658985/
Depression and social media: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7364393/
would also add this research direction: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24331897/
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.
- 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
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!
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.
Consider that. A whole population afraid of each other. That's some kind of epidemic.
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.
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.
And if you ask for an interpretation of one of those quotes they get evasive.