Iowa universities, facing mental health woes, look at social media ills

UI Counselling recently created its own Instagram and TikTok accounts to promote services, share details about workshops, provide mental health tools and humanise providers in helping them connect with students. — Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash

IOWA CITY: A majority of this fall's university freshman were born in 2004 — the same year Facebook joined Myspace in the online landscape — and have never lived in a world without social media.

Just three years after Facebook's inception came the iPhone, cultivating a culture where today's students came of age looking for acceptance, affirmation, information and connection through likes, retweets and endless scrolling via handheld devices they take with them seemingly everywhere.