“AT its core, social media is a public pinboard of self-expression, a set of arenas where anything we post inevitably doubles as a signal of our identity.”
“The more explicit mode of self-expression has led to the proliferation of identity-bait articles, cooked up not to be especially informative but to be shared as condensed bits of the whole you.”
“each builds toward the same formulaic takeaway: “I’m X and I’m great!””
“With all the opportunities social media offers to share, we are invited to proclaim as many of those Xs as we can.”
“The potential dimensions of our personality are compounding exponentially as a result, with each offering us an ersatz community to belong to and take pride in.”
“We’re using pre-packaged, shareable content to articulate everything from allergies and pet peeves to nuanced distinctions within and between categories like race, gender, sexuality, and mental health.”
“When people use sharable content to affiliate themselves with mental-health conditions, it can help expand their visibility in a society that tends to suppress them. This can be empowering. It breaks down stigmas and opens lines of communication. But it can also be trivializing, particularly given the incentives social media provide users to spuriously lay claim to illnesses that only medical professionals are qualified to diagnose.”
“Because they are optimized for identity signaling rather than for being informative, these listicles tend to romanticize mental health conditions — anxiety is really just a pesky side effect of intelligence; introverts are people with rich interior lives who just hate surprise parties.”
“It applies an attractive sheen to potentially concerning behaviors, boiling them down to overthinking or occasional antisociality.”
“It broadens the definition of these conditions to allow anyone to claim them in exchange for sympathy or applause, increasing the chances they will get wider distribution in social media.”
“Self-diagnosis in the form of engagement with viral content becomes a successful personal-branding strategy.”
“Identity-bait listicles invite readers to indulge a kind of cyberchondria for attention, a like-driven version of Munchausen syndrome. They propose a bare-minimum, pop-psychology-inflected definition of mental-health conditions, making them lowest-common-denominator enough to allow the broadest base of readers to identity with it and possibly share it. While this may raise awareness of a condition, it also raises the level of confusion about it.”
“Lots of people worry, but generalized anxiety disorder is a specific condition with particular diagnostic criteria. More likely than not, someone actually suffering from anxiety will not be relieved to see their stressors catalogued as a series of bullet-pointed quips. At worst, they may be discouraged from seeking help if they are led to believe their struggles are something ordinary that everyone suffers from. How can you know for sure whether you have anxiety after probing the possibility online?”
“Clickbait listicles on mental health contribute to a fun-house mirror of self-expression that sets us all at an introspective disadvantage.”
“You can be stressed about achieving all of your life goals and not have generalized anxiety disorder. You can enjoy watching Netflix alone and still be a little bit of an extrovert. It’s complex! You’re complex. But viral social media doesn’t thrive on such complexities. The more we try to capture ourselves in the confines of shareable parameters, the further away we get from understanding who we are.”