13.2. Unhealthy Activities on Social Media#
Given the complex relationship between internet-based social media and mental health, let’s first look at some social media activities that people may find harmful to their mental health. Here are a few examples:
13.2.1. Doomscrolling#
Doomscrolling is:
“Tendency to continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing. Many people are finding themselves reading continuously bad news about COVID-19 without the ability to stop or step back.”
Fig. 13.1 Tweet on doomscrolling [m9] the day after insurrectionists stormed the US Capital (while still in the middle of the COVID pandemic).#
The seeking out of bad news, or trying to get news even though it might be bad, has existed as long as people have kept watch to see if a family member will return home safely. But of course, new mediums can provide more information to sift through and more quickly, such as with the advent of the 24-hour news cycle [m10] in the 1990s, or, now social media.
13.2.2. Trauma Dumping#
While there are healthy ways of sharing difficult emotions and experiences (see the next section), when these difficult emotions and experiences are thrown at unsuspecting and unwilling audiences, that is called trauma dumping [m11]. Social media can make trauma dumping easier. For example, with parasocial relationships, you might feel like the celebrity is your friend who wants to hear your trauma. And with context collapse, where audiences are combined, how would you share your trauma with an appropriate audience and not an inappropriate one (e.g., if you re-post something and talk about how it reminds you of your trauma, are you dumping it on the original poster?).
Trauma dumping can be bad for the mental health of those who have this trauma unexpectedly thrown at them, and it also often isn’t helpful for the person doing the trauma dumping either:
Venting, by contrast, is a healthy form of expressing negative emotion, such as anger and frustration, in order to move past it and find solutions. Venting is done with the permission of the listener and is a one-shot deal, not a recurring retelling or rumination of negativity. A good vent allows the venter to get a new perspective and relieve pent-up stress and emotion.
While there are benefits to venting, there are no benefits to trauma dumping. In trauma dumping, the person oversharing doesn’t take responsibility or show self-reflection. Trauma dumping is delivered on the unsuspecting. The purpose is to generate sympathy and attention not to process negative emotion. The dumper doesn’t want to overcome their trauma; if they did, they would be deprived of the ability to trauma dump.
13.2.3. Munchausen by Internet#
Munchausen Syndrome (or Factitious disorder imposed on self [m13]) is when someone pretends to have a disease, like cancer, to get sympathy or attention. People with various illnesses often find support online, and even form online communities. It is often easier to fake an illness in an online community than in an in-person community, so many have done so [m14] (like the fake @Sciencing_Bi fake dying of covid in the authenticity chapter). People who fake these illnesses often do so as a result of their own mental illness, so, in fact, “they are sick, albeit […] in a very different way than claimed” [m15].
13.2.4. Digital Self-Harm#
Sometimes people will harm their bodies (called “self-harm” [m16]) as a way of expressing or trying to deal with negative emotions or situations.
Self-harm doesn’t always have to be physical though, and some people find ways of causing emotional self-harm through the internet.
Self-Bullying#
One form of digital self-harm is self-bullying [m17], where people set up fake alternate accounts which they then use to post bullying messages at themselves.
Negative Communities#
Another form of digital self-harm is through joining toxic negative communities built around tearing each other down and reinforcing a hopeless worldview. (Content warning: sex and self-harm)
In 2018, Youtuber ContraPoints [m18] (Natalie Wynn) made a video exploring the extremely toxic online Incel community and related it to her own experience with a toxic 4chan community. (Content warning: Sex, violence, self-hatred, and self-harm)
Note: The video might not embed right, and if you want to watch it, you might have to click to open it in youtube.
Since you might not want to watch a 35-minute video, here are a few key summary points and quotes:
“Incel” [m19] is short for “involuntarily celibate,” meaning they are men who have centered their identity on wanting to have sex with women, but with no women “giving” them sex. Incels objectify women and sex, claiming they have a right to have women want to have sex with them. Incels believe they are being unfairly denied this sex because of the few sexually attractive men (”Chads” [m20]), and because feminism told women they could refuse to have sex. Some incels believe their biology (e.g., skull shape) means no women will “give” them sex. They will be forever alone, without sex, and unhappy. The incel community has produced multiple mass murderers and terrorist attacks [m21].
In the video, ContraPoints says that in some forums, incels will post pictures of themselves, knowing and expecting that the community will proceed to criticize everything about their appearance and reinforce hopelessness:
The truth about incels is that almost all of them are completely normal looking guys. But of course that’s not the feedback they get from other incels. The feedback they get is that their chins are weak, their hair is thin, their skin is garbage and there’s no hope whatsoever, no woman will ever love them, they are truecels with no option but to lie down and rot.
ContraPoints then relates this to her experience with a 4chan message board that, unlike other in other online trans communities, consisted of trans women tearing down each others’ appearances, saying that no one would ever see them as a woman (they would never “pass” as a woman), and saying that no trans woman could ever pass. As a somewhat public trans woman, the community often posted about her:
For a while I had some stans on the board who basically viewed me as inspiration […] of course that kind of post is frowned upon.
If I’m not looked at as a big-skulled manly freak, if my transition is going well, that means that some of their transitions might go well too, and that is an unacceptable conclusion for a community founded on self-loathing and hopelessness.
So it was necessary for the rest of the board to explain why I didn’t pass, why I would never pass, and why anyone who looked less good than me shouldn’t even fucking think about it. They shouldn’t transition at all, they should just repress, they should lie down and rot.
ContraPoints says she regularly searched these forums to see what terrible things people said about her:
And there would be this thrill of going to TTTT and reading other people saying what my deepest anxieties told me was really true. And that was always painful but there was a kind of pleasure too. There was a rush.
It’s exciting to burst out of the politically correct bubble and say what you’re really thinking: that personality doesn’t matter because big-skulled Chads get all the girls, that ContraPoints is a big-skulled hon with a voice like nails on a chalkboard.
And at first I justified the habit by telling myself I was just doing research. I have to keep tabs on what the bigots are saying, that’s simply my job. But soon I realized it wasn’t just research, and it was infecting me away from the computer.
She then describes this as a form of digital self-harm, calling it “masochistic epistemology: whatever hurts is true” (note: “masochistic” means seeking pain, and “epistemology” means how you determine what is true).
ContraPoints then gives her advice to these incels who have turned inward with self-hatred and digital self-harm:
So, incels. I’m not going to respond to your worldview like its an intellectual position worthy of rational debate. Because these ideas and arguments, you’re not using them the way rational people use arguments. You’re using them as razor blades to abuse yourselves.
And I know because I’ve done the exact same thing.
The incel worldview is catastrophizing. It’s an anxious death spiral. And the solution to that has to be therapeutic, not logical.
Note
If you are suffering from mental health problems (as both authors of this book have), please seek help, whether from friends, counselors, or mental health crisis hotlines such as the new 988 hotline [m22].