The Influence of Overconsumption and Luxury Consumption on Mental Health

Abstract

In face of the recent problems of adolescent’s mental health, such as depression and suicide, this study aims to explore the relationships between adolescent overconsumption (including overconsumption and luxury consumption) and mental health, so as to find out the poor mental health causal factors and offer corresponding countermeasures. Firstly, the main concept of overconsumption and healthy adolescent mental health will be defined. Methodologically, the study takes a method of defining six typical studies (3 about overconsumption, 3 about luxury consumption) as reference, and the methods include thematic synthesis, cross-sectional survey and statistical method (chi-square test, Pearson correlation). The results are as follows: overconsumption caused by social comparison, “face culture” and media will lead to anxiety, low self-esteem and compulsive buying; joint family pressure will promote overconsumption and depression. Luxury consumption will bring about two types of effects, the former being that it makes materialists feel satisfied in status establishment in the short term, while the latter is that it will cause inauthenticity in the long run and reduce social warmth; Western-centric samples will limit the generalization of samples. Conclusions are as follows: proposing mitigation strategies (value education, media regulation, consumer literacy integration), and suggesting future researches to explore causality issues and expand the generalization of non-Western samples. This study is conducive to promoting healthy adolescent consumption and protecting mental health.