There is no scientific research to back up my claim or explain this link between depression and social media use — or at least I haven’t been able to find any. There are plenty of studies into how social media may cause depression, but the evidence is thin: For every study claiming proof that social media is harmful, there’s another saying it isn’t. (One study from the University of Missouri from February 2015 basically tried to settle the debate by saying it all depends on how you use it. Stalk acquaintances and compare your life to theirs, and bang, here comes depression. Dotingly check on your friends and family, and you’ll be happy. Which begs the question: Have the researchers ever actually used Facebook?)

“Oh yes, I see that a lot,” my psychiatrist said matter-of-factly when I asked her whether her other depressive patients were also unable to use social media. “One even dumped her phone recently.”

Yet while there may be no research into the effect social media may have on an already existing depression, to specialists that effect appears so obvious that it isn’t even particularly noteworthy. “Oh yes, I see that a lot,” my psychiatrist at the Psychiatric University Clinic of Berlin’s Charité hospital said matter-of-factly when I asked her whether her other depressive patients were also unable to use social media. “One even dumped her phone recently.” That’s because social media and constant availability cause stress, she explained. “Also, when you’re suffering from depression, you don’t usually want to see other people’s amazing lives.”

Seeking more explanations, I went all the way up the food chain to Professor Isabella Heuser, director of the Charité’s Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, who swiftly confirmed my psychiatrist’s assessment of the incompatibility of depression and social media. (While nearly all patients she’s seen stay off social media altogether, she did concede that some patients go on Facebook when they can’t sleep at night, although she says they generally don’t, or can’t, talk about their depression on the platform and don’t get anything positive out of the experience).

I laid out to her what I’d found out through self-observation.

That I wasn’t able to perform for social media anymore. I used to go through life mentally composing tweets and spotting photo opportunities for Instagram. That was unthinkable now. The mere thought caused so much anxiety that I could barely unclench my jaws. That I now consciously suffered from comparing my life to others’, which was also new. That I was experiencing a powerful craving for instant gratification that also felt incredibly harmful — remember the receding waters — and that wreaked further havoc to my already suffering attention span.

“Well, it’s easy to explain that physiologically,” Professor Heuser said when she heard the last point. “Through your daily engagement with social media your brain has learned that when you log on in the morning, a pleasant feeling will follow. Escapism, a positive world. That’s dopamine, anticipation, and you can still experience that. However, the positive feeling that usually follows — your organism can’t mount that response anymore. That’s a classic symptom of depression. You can’t feel joy or connection to others anymore.” And because my brain knows what joy used to feel like, she explained, its absence, that emptiness, is experienced subconsciously as painful. The fact that I found it so hard to resist the lure of said dopamine release was also easy to explain, she said: “Will has to do with energy. And depression is characterised precisely by a lack of energy.” And as far as my attention span went, well, if it had been low before, depression may now simply have pushed it below a threshold that I considered tolerable.

I took to my Facebook feed in search of material and the further I went back, the more jealous I felt at my own life as I had portrayed it.

So far, so medically straightforward. But what about the sudden sense of inferiority? I told Professor Heuser of one particularly crass example: Shortly before my second break-down, an artist friend had asked me to participate in a video examining the way we portray ourselves and our accomplishments, both online and off. I was to read out a few of my own social media posts. I took to my Facebook feed in search of material and the further I went back, the more jealous I felt at my own life as I had portrayed it. There they were, my glowing posts from Istanbul, Tokyo, and New York City, my tales of adventures in the West Bank and the Baltic Sea, the stories I’d written and magazines I’d edited, my clever commentary on current affairs, all rounded off by likes and comments from people I’d met (or not) at some point in my life — irrevocable proof that I’d once been successful, popular, joyful, happy even. At roughly 12 months into the past I was so overcome by self-pity that I had to break the whole thing off.

Professor Heuser thought for a moment. “That’s only indirectly related to social media,” she finally said. “People suffering from depression are incredibly creative at convincing themselves they are losers. But we live in a world that’s hyper-communicative — not really communicative, but narcissistic. Everybody is always ‘sharing’ something, only that it isn’t really sharing, it’s posting something to a wall in the hope that as many people as possible will come past and ‘like’ it. The purpose is to feed our narcissism. It is a many-voiced monologue, a cacophony. Everybody is posting something, but we aren’t talking to each other.”

This isn’t novel criticism to be levelled at either social media or contemporary culture, and under any other circumstance, I would have waved it away as Luddite. However, now for the first time in over 10 years of social media use did I actually understand it, feel the truth of it in my guts—and I realised to what extent I had happily played along. I was reminded of that famous quote by Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology: “Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself.” To a healthy person, some phoney dialogue might appear tedious at worst. But to someone suffering from depression, the superficiality of social media may just be outrightly harmful.