Anxiety disorder and consumption of social media in Brazil

Abstract

Brazilian population spends a lot of time on social media. The average access from any device is 3 hours and 39 minutes (The Global, 2018). On the other hand, the country leads the numbers of anxiety disorder among the population. According to the World Health Organization, the incidence in the country is 9.3%, while the world average is 3.5%. This number is even higher in big cities, reaching 19.9% in the city of São Paulo (Horta, 2019). Possible causes are economic instability, social changes and violence (Horta, 2019). Add to that the political polarization in recent years and the intensive use of gadgets, private chat applications, such as Whatsapp, and social networks. In this work, we focus on the influence of social networks in the development of Brazilian anxiety. Our hypothesis is that the intensity of use reinforces the existence of other factors of anxiety increase (economy, violence, political division, etc.) through the sharing of news, besides adding others, such as self-display, performativity and the need of always being in evidence in social networks. As a method, we will work with content analysis (news and images) from the main social networking platforms used in Brazil.