Can over-sharing on social media be dangerous?
Have we lost the ability to distinguish what it’s appropriate to air in public and what we should keep private? The addictive nature of social media, and a tendency to assume that absolute candour always benefits our mental health, is leading some people to make startling confessions about their lives online.
You’ve probably seen these posts on Twitter, Facebook and similar platforms. Often, they involve a milestone that the poster believes is significant in their struggle against addiction or mental illness. They have gone two weeks without alcohol, three months without drugs, a year without self-harming or attempting suicide, for example.
Invariably, these confidences attract a lot of attention, including huge numbers of likes and shares. It’s hard to react otherwise, but by communicating our encouragement, usually to complete strangers who have serious vulnerabilities, are we really being kind, or do we risk causing more damage in the longer term?
Insiders from social media companies admit openly that their platforms are designed to addict users. This process relies upon the “hit” of dopamine that people experience when their posts attract likes and positive comments. If that really is the case, we are effectively persuading addicts and those with compulsive behaviours to exchange one form of high for another.
It seems likely that their feelings about themselves will become connected to the recognition that they receive from social media. And it’s not difficult to imagine how this could be a dangerous trend for people with fragile mental health.
If their progress and self-esteem are dependent on likes and shares online, what happens when that attention is absent, or when they receive a cruel reply, rather than the usual platitudes? Most of us, when we engage with these posts, are trying to be helpful — and in an individual case we may indeed give the person a boost — but we could also be reinforcing a troubling fashion for over-sharing.
Instinctively, we know that it’s better to share anxieties, worries and other things that distress us, rather than keeping them bottled up. There’s a difference, though, between speaking to a friend, a professional or another suitable confidant, and publishing our personal problems on a public platform. Yet, the more confessional people become on social media, the more they seem to be congratulated for their openness and bravery. I can’t be the only one to find this tendency uncomfortable and unsettling.
How will people’s work lives be affected by playing out their insecurities, anxieties, sexual peccadilloes and health issues in public? Will a potential employer be as likely to offer a job to somebody who has celebrated the “achievement” of not taking cocaine for three weeks on social media? Would they really entrust an important project to a person who has shared intimate details about the debilitating effects of their depression online? Perhaps — but inevitably, there will be a temptation to show support in public, but to privately “mark their card”. There’s a risk too, that we’re creating a marketplace in lurid revelations, where the most startling admission is rewarded with the greatest reaction and the loudest encouragement.
It seems to me that, whenever people pour out their emotions and vulnerabilities online, two separate but connected trends are colliding. Firstly, though we’re connected to more people than ever before through social media, the predominance of this form of communication has made many of us lonely too. We crave opportunities to confide our hopes, worries and fears in somebody — anybody — because we have fewer chances to share these thoughts in person.
Secondly, we’re told so incessantly that “awareness” of mental health issues is important that this message has become somehow confused with the idea that it’s always best to divulge our innermost anxieties and struggles. There’s a growing literature that links the current fashion for identity politics, among other problems, to the rise of a “therapeutic society” in the 1960s, and the tendency to elevate individual feelings over the needs of the community.
Some critics allege that there’s a modern habit of medicalising behaviours that are actually grounded in conventional social and societal causes. It might be useful to get to the root of a person’s unhappiness, but does putting a medical label on their difficulty help them to overcome it, or does it feed a sense of powerlessness and victimhood, when what they really need is some practical assistance?
These are deeper questions that touch upon our overarching view of mental health, but they’re certainly connected to the modern urge to let it all hang out. Perversely, personality traits that were once prized qualities, like reserve, composure and a stiff-upper lip, are now pathologised as signs of repression. The common perception is that we should all express who we feel we are in every particular, and the more flamboyantly we do it, the more we should be celebrated.
I see these posts in my social media feeds because the same people are always engaging with them. I’m sure they have the best intentions. But perhaps the next time you instinctively reach for the like button, it would be worth pausing to think for a moment.
Are you simply reaching out to somebody who needs it badly. Or are you helping to entrench a social media culture of oversharing, at the same time cruel and mawkishly sentimental, that rewards people for plastering their private business all over a public platform?
