Cyber Bullying: The Biggest Threat to Mental Health

Mental health often goes under the radar for many people. It’s seen as a secondary and trivial thing, while it should be a necessity of life. An instance of giving it little value is when others commit bullying.

Bullying is one of the most destructive things to mental health. While bullying can be prevented in a classroom environment, with teachers keeping watch, it can’t be as easily prevented in an online environment, which is devastating to students’ reputations and well-being.

Students utilize social media and instant messaging applications.

Through these applications, they can message each other and create friend chat groups, where they can help with homework or hang out; however, as beneficial as these applications can be, they also have a sinister side.

These applications can send harsh, inappropriate, and insulting messages to students. Unfortunately, it is not as easy to report these things, as the perpetrator can unsend their messages, which breeds distrust among classmates. In addition, teachers and guidance counselors can’t quickly tell who’s lying since there aren’t any visible signs of abuse; most of the time, they ignore the allegations.

It allows for the harassment to get worse. It can escalate to blackmail and the leaking of private or sensitive situations. It can destroy a student’s reputation and cause them to become outcasts. The emotional trauma is confirmed. The sadness or guilt experienced isn’t any less damaging than actual bullying. Cyberbullying leads to mental illnesses and, in the worst cases, can lead to self-harm and suicide. The people being cyberbullied have no one to talk to. This act needs to stop; people need to be aware of the dangers of cyberbullying and how it isn’t a joke that’s to be brushed off. We need to make people aware of the power of words. We need to make people aware that their actions can have devastating responsibilities.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can help people through their pain and bring awareness to this obscure topic. Take action, and help people turn their lives around.

Faith: Keeping One's Morality Intact

Everyone has had to choose in life, and most of the time, an essential contributor to that decision is whether it's "right" or "wrong." When we were kids, we always thought this matter was straightforward. We always thought it was clear what was right and wrong, and we were wholly unreasonable and illogical to pick what was wrong and be the "bad guy" in the shows we watched. Why would you want to harm the world and others? Why would you like to cause destruction and corruption? Why would you be that selfish?

However, growing up, we realize that the situation is much more complicated than black and white. That is because there is no true morality in logic and reason, as worldly humans are ultimately selfish and can justify any act given the proper conditions. The only thing that can stop this justification process, however, is the outside.

If you straightforwardly ask people, most normal people will say they would never choose to be evil. However, many of those same people would falter, given the perspective of someone who chose the other side. For instance, if you or any other person watches a show or a movie from the perspective of a hero, you will side with the hero. The shocking thing is that if you watch the same performance with the same characters and story from the opposite perspective, chances are you'll side with the villain. That is simply due to the person's reasoning process in each scenario.

How that reasoning process works is very simple: I am in these conditions, so it would benefit me to do this and this. So it is the primary thought process of humans to use only worldly logic, even if their conscious fights this decision and even if it comes at the expense of others. That consciousness will be convinced once the conditions are severe enough.

Let me demonstrate everything I said using a simple example. When we were kids, we all watched Batman, and we always rooted for him as he is the good guy. We also always wanted the Joker to fail as we hated the destruction he caused to Gotham City. However, when the new movie depicting the Joker's perspective was released, watchers surprisingly sided with him as they saw all the abuse he received that put him on a crazy revenge mission on "the unsympathetic people" of Gotham City. Showing his perspective instantly convinced people of his actions and even led them to cheer him on. This situation reached the point that police needed to go undercover in theaters to ensure no acts of violence occurred after the film (The Washington Post). The only way to keep morality from going into the abyss is through religion and remembrance of the afterlife. After all, if you remove those two from your thought process, there is absolutely no reason to do "good," and there is almost no definite way to know what is "good." This is because it reaches a point where it is simply pointless to care about others or whatever happens to them unless that directly affects you. That is simply because the conditions can put you in a place where this choice, for example, killing a person, is a choice that is very beneficial to you while there is no downside to doing it. After all, why would the person be more important to you than yourself under those severe conditions; his death isn't going to affect you ultimately. So you can get away with it, your life will be better, and you'll completely forget about it. You might even tell yourself that they were going to die anyways; it was only a matter of time.

I understand that you might be utterly shocked by what I wrote, but that is because I wrote it out of mere logic and reason to show you how far everything can be justified without religion. With the faith put into consideration, the whole cycle I went through gets shut down from the beginning as you cannot get away with an evil act like that since you'll pay for it in the afterlife, making it completely unreasonable. And doing good, even if it inconveniences you in this world, will benefit you in the longer run. It's as simple as that. This is the only way to keep one's morality intact, as logic and reason can allow everything under the right circumstances.

Video Games: The Internet’s Double-edged Sword

“Hey! Stop playing those video games so much, they are bad for you.” is a sentence I’m sure we’ve all heard at least once or twice before, but have you ever stopped to think about why they’re bad for you? Well, contrary to popular belief, video games are actually pretty good for you. Video games have long been recorded as having negative effects, from causing violence to desensitizing children to horrible things. However, new studies that have been conducted show that video games have positive effects on children and adults alike.

In the past, we have made and produced games that give a bad reputation to gaming itself (think Grand Theft Auto, Call Of Duty etc.). These games have a violent nature—which is okay for their intended audience of players age 18 and up—and are not marketed towards children. The problem starts when news and media outlets report on these games and “conveniently” exclude the games’ age rating, thus tarnishing the gaming industry.

Looking past their reputation, video games are a workout for your mind disguised as fun.

First Person Shooter games (FPS) games can improve spatial awareness and muscle memory as well as reflexes. Puzzle solving games help with improving problem solving and analytical skills alongside boosting creativity. Story based games help improve instantaneous and accurate decision-making skills and help build a decisive mindset. These skills are important in our daily lives, and are proven to be further enhanced by positive effects of video games.

In a study published by C. S. Green & Bavelier in 2012, participants who played shooter type games showed faster and more accurate attention allocation, higher spatial awareness and enhanced mental rotation abilities, meaning an improved sense of one’s surroundings and adaptability. A meta-analysis (Uttal et al., 2013) found that the benefits of video games on spatial awareness were comparable to formal (High school and university) level courses aimed at improving the same set of skills.

Regularly doing puzzles and playing puzzle games helps to establish new connections inside your grey matter, which improves your shortterm memory. A University of Michigan research discovered that participants who did puzzles for 25 minutes a day improved their IQ scores by four points. This helps with real life decision making and problem solving. Most of our daily tasks are repetitive but some require said problem solving skills.

Now some might say that video games cause addiction and while that might be true in some cases, most people are not addicted to video games. The brain can develop and addiction to anything that causes the release of dopamine, the brain’s “happy” chemical. This means that anything enjoyable activity could be addictive so it’s best to enjoy things—like gaming—in moderation. Setting a limit on the amount of time played as well as engaging in other activities outside gaming helps to stop addiction.

At the end of the day, video games have had a bad reputation that has affected their ability to do good in our society but they can help with our day-to-day lives as well as our mental abilities. However, like most things, video games should be used in moderation to take advantage of their positive effects without causing negative effects that might out weigh them.