Sharing – Media literacy and mental health go hand in hand

I think part of our problem with being informed versus harming our mental health is a lack of media literacy. This article from VCU talks about it:

There’s no escaping the news these days. The algorithms that shape social media are ubiquitous to today’s culture — pushing the news to the front of our feeds. Worse, these algorithms tend to promote the most miserable news because it drives engagement.

https://commonwealthtimes.org/2026/03/04/media-literacy-and-mental-health-go-hand-in-hand/

I think there are a couple of things at play:

1. We never learned what “enough” information was, so we have all been convinced that having more information is always better. This is why we get burned out reading and watching the media. This desire is also extremely easy to exploit. Social media has been doing it, but so has some traditional media, which always inundates us with stories designed to make us fearful and then promises more and more information that will keep us safe.
2. Our lack of media literacy makes it difficult to see through the messaging. We struggled with this long before AI; it’s only getting worse. It’s not easy to know the truth; a solid foundation in media literacy helps us not get fooled as often.
3. We’ve become extremely averse to discomfort. We seek out more information until we find a comforting take that excuses us for being uncomfortable with the truth and for choosing to believe something else instead.

As much as the internet and global news sources can be a blessing, they can also be overwhelming for those unprepared to navigate them. I don’t say these kinds of things often, lest I be accused of being a grumpy old man, but there was a time when we taught people how to think, how to analyze what they saw and read. I suspect we stopped doing that in favor of better test scores.

The impacts of this lack of media literacy can be found in some of the mental health struggles we have across society, with anxiety, stress, burnout, etc. We’re overwhelmed by information with no tools to manage it effectively. We don’t know what’s true, so we keep scrolling for answers that aren’t coming.