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Browsing negative content online makes mental health struggles worse: Study

People struggling with their mental health are more likely to browse negative content online, and in turn, that negative content makes their symptoms worse, according to a series of studies by researchers at MIT.

The group behind the research has developed a web plug-in tool to help those looking to protect their mental health make more informed decisions about the content they view. The findings were outlined in an open-access paper by Tali Sharot, an adjunct professor of cognitive neurosciences at MIT and professor at University College London, and Christopher A. Kelly, a former visiting PhD student who was a member of Sharot’s Affective Brain Lab when the studies were conducted, who is now a postdoc at Stanford University’s Institute for Human Centered AI. “People with worse mental health tend to seek out more-negative and fear-inducing content, which in turn exacerbates their symptoms, creating a vicious feedback loop,” Kelly says.

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