An award for everything, the word “selfie” won last year’s Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year: “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website”.
You see them all over social media. Kinda cute for the first five minutes but when some people change their profile photo several times a day, it may be indicative of a problem.
In the case of one nineteen-year-old man, his obsession with taking the perfect self-portrait resulted in his snapping two hundred photographs of himself every day in its quest. When his perception of perfection was found unattainable, he was driven to attempt suicide.
It is becoming apparent that the selfie craze is affecting those with a predilection for obsessive-compulsive behaviors and self-image issues, providing an outlet and vehicle for addiction.
The man recognized his addiction and fortunately sought help. His treatment included being separated from his smart phone for ten-minute increments beginning at ten minutes for up to an hour. His experience:
“It was excruciating to begin with but I knew I had to do it if I wanted to go on living.”
Other cognitive behavior modification techniques were applied to allow him to recognize his behavior, its causes, and alter his response to its compulsion. One of the man’s therapists has seen a trend emerge in recent years:
“Danny’s case is particularly extreme but this is a serious problem. It’s not a vanity issue. It’s a mental health one which has an extremely high suicide rate.”
The mental health and self-esteem issues aren’t new but the technology in which to optimally exploit them is. A 2012 study looked into addiction to Facebook with a sample of 423 university students. Subjects were asked to complete questionnaires on their sleep habits and personality traits. The devised self-reporting scale ([1] very rarely, [2] rarely, [3] sometimes, [4] often [5] very often) showed correlating levels of addiction:
- You spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook or plan use of Facebook.
- You feel an urge to use Facebook more and more.
- You use Facebook in order to forget about personal problems.
- You have tried to cut down on the use of Facebook without success.
- You become restless or troubled if you are prohibited from using Facebook.
- You use Facebook so much that it has had a negative impact on your job/studies.
The scores on the scale dovetailed with reported Facebook activity and high scores were associated with late bed- and rising-times. Further, scores were positively associated to neuroticism and extroversion and negatively correlated with conscientiousness.[1] No surprise there.