

If you are a younger person, is likely that you have at least one form of social media; in fact, you probably have more than just one. Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube - basically any website that allows users to interact with each other and share ideas is considered a social media site. Social media sites are extremely popular because they allow users to keep in contact with friends and family, explore new ideas and mind-sets, and find like-minded individuals. These all seem like entirely positive things, and don’t get me wrong they are, but there is a downside also that most people don’t think about. Social media sites are a good place to share ideas, but not all the ideas are good; they are a helpful tool to connect you with similar people, but not all those people are helpful. Social media sites can spread and encourage dangerous ideas, especially in the impressionable young people who frequent them the most. One especially dangerous idea that has spread through adolescents recently is self-harm.

Self-harm is defined as non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI). This is the act of intentionally harming oneself (such as: hitting, cutting, starving, burning, etc.) without the intent of ending one’s life. The intended effect is to feel better temporarily, but it is all too easy for a person to accidentally go too far and cause permanent harm or death.  Self-harming is a dangerous trend almost exclusively amongst teenagers that it has a lot of doctors and parents worried. In recent years, there has been an incredible rise in the number of teenagers participating in NSSI behaviors. There isn’t one completely agreed upon statistic, but the majority of studies show that self-harm has a prevalence of around 10-15% in adolescents with some studies going as high as 38% and some as low as 4% (Whitlock et al., Leonard, Sass).  This is an incredibly high percentage – statistically, an average of one out of 10 classmates you know have self-harmed. 

There are several different factors that can push a person to want to self-harm. Feeling extremely stressed, dealing with depression or other mental disorders, feeling out of control of one’s life, or wanting to punish oneself are all traditional reasons, but recently psychiatrists and psychologists are beginning to identify another reason young people in particular are “experimenting” with self-harm: to fit in. These doctors are beginning to see cases of self-harm where the person is acting in an attempt to gain access and acceptance in a specific social group (Mitchell et al.). There is a secretive, but significant, portion of social media users that post content related to self-harm. Because most sites identify users by screennames instead of real names, users can have as much anonymity as they want, making it easier for them to talk about more sensitive and difficult topics, like NSSI - in fact, it is probable that self-harm is so prevalent on social media because it is the only place that self-harmers feel safe discussing it. This has wonderful benefits: allowing struggling teens an outlet for their emotions and giving researchers a glimpse into their thoughts and feelings (Grohol). Unfortunately though, this has created a rather large number of users who post NSSI content, creating a relatively secretive, but inclusive, social group. By participating in self-harm, people are allowed almost unconditional inclusion to that group. This is an attractive option for adolescents, who tend to struggle finding an identity and social group of their own (Whitlock et al.).

NSSI social media users usually post pictures, tips, quotes, or personal stories about their experiences, and they look at similar content themselves. This can be an extremely positive interaction and can make social media sites incredible support systems for those who want to recover from NSSI when users share their content like recovery stories or inspirational quotes. More often than not, however, the interaction between self-harmers online is negative. Users usually post sad or hopeless content and discourage one another from recovery (Lewis et al.). For instance, they share tips on how to hide NSSI behavior from adults instead of tips on how to ask adults for help. This enables people who practice NSSI hide their problem, which allows the situation to worsen. NSSI users also tend to share self-treatment information which despite good intentions can cause more harm than good.  Studies show that young people tend to believe information that their peers share without feeling the need to verify it, but most young self-harmers are not knowledgeable about medicine, thus the self-treatment tips they post can be incorrect (Menczer). Believing false first aid advice can discourage a self-harmer from seeking professional medical help when they truly need it. 

Simply being exposed to NSSI content makes self-harmers more likely to relapse due to triggering. Triggering is when a person sees or hears something that causes a strong emotional response like sadness, fear, or pain (Brown). Such strong responses cause extreme emotional distress to the person, and when they don’t know how to deal with that distress, they have the urge to self-harm. Triggering is usually an enormous problem for recovering self-harmers because of the abundance of NSSI content on their social media. Social media sites usually have a type of “follow” or “subscribe” option that allows users to keep up to date with other users or content they enjoy. This content usually comes up immediately after logging into the site, like how you are directed straight to your News Feed after logging into FaceBook. NSSI users tend to follow or subscribe to similar NSSI content, meaning that it is extremely easy for a person trying to recover to accidently see NSSI content on the social media site and be triggered and perhaps relapse.  This issue is so common that doctors and therapists will advise their patients who are trying to stop NSSI to limit social media access, or even discontinue their social media accounts altogether, to increase the probability of a smooth and successful recovery. 

The abundance of NSSI content online not only makes the situation worse for current self-harmers; it can make non-self-harmers more likely try NSSI.  Everything has a general audience in mind - NSSI content included - but anything published can be viewed by audiences other than what is intended. Once NSSI content is published to a social media site, it is usually public and remarkably easy to find thanks to new tools, like the hashtag. This high level of accessibility is worrisome because it exposes “innocent” users to disturbing content.  For example, on Instagram there are blocks on certain tags, like #cutting, that keep people from searching for inappropriate content. Young NSSI Instagram users are able to bypass these restrictions by substituting NSSI terms for more vague or related terms, for example, the hashtag #cat is now used in place of #cutting (Moreno et al.). This means that someone who only wants to see cute kitty pictures could accidently stumble across graphic self-mutilation. This particular example is especially tricky because Instagram would be hard-pressed to ban the cat hashtag. This unintentional and seemingly unavoidable exposure to NSSI is what allows the behavior to spread in a phenomenon labeled “social contagion” (Whitlock et al.) Social contagion is defined as the epidemic-like spreading of ideas and behaviors. Self-harm is very comparable to a physical illness, like the flu, because of the way it infects and spreads throughout social groups (Whitlock et al.). Social contagion  can be a passive phenomenon, like when you see your friends all playing some new video game, you want to get the same game and play it for yourself, or it can be more aggressive, like the classic example of peer pressure where your friends are trying to convince you to do drugs with them. Young people especially are susceptible to social contagion because they are going through such a turbulent time in their lives; adolescents have immense pressure and desire to find their own identity and to fit in with a group. When impressionable young people see self-injurious content online, they begin to believe that NSSI could be a possible solution to their problems and makes them more likely to try it (Whitlock et al.). 

Regularly seeing NSSI content also reinforces the idea that self-harm is a normal, even expected, way for youth to deal with their problems because the prevalence of the self-harm content normalizes NSSI behavior. Normalizes means that repeated exposure to something desensitizes you to it, so if youth are constantly seeing self-harm related images and text, they lose sense of the severity of the issue –similar to how doctors and nurses are not affected by blood or bile because they are used to seeing and dealing with sick and injured patients. Becoming desensitized to NSSI makes it easier for adolescents to disregard the risks and experiment with self-harm.

Considering all the ways that social media sites facilitate NSSI behavior, you would think that they would be proactive about stopping it. After all, the owners of social media sites have a certain amount responsibility to their users to provide a safe environment. This is why many sites, such as Tumblr, have implemented user guidelines. These guidelines state the rules of the website, like what can and cannot be posted. Some sites, like Tumblr, delete inappropriate posts and sometimes block users and hashtags that violate the guidelines. Removing harmful content is a great idea, but not highly effective because the sites are not being proactive enough. Moderators don’t usually actively monitor site content for guideline violations, instead acting only when other users report each other. The reason this method is ineffective is because self-harmers who are actively searching for, posting, and viewing NSSI content don’t want to report it (Moreno et al.).  Because of this system, it could take days, weeks, or longer for inappropriate content to be reported and taken down, if it is even reported at all. By then the content could have circulated to hundreds or thousands of users and been reposted multiple times. 

Some sites now have Content Advisory Warnings that pop up when users search for certain hashtags. For instance, when you search for #anorexia on Tumblr, it pulls up a page titled “Everything Okay?” that has the phone number and link for NEDA (National Eating Disorders Association) and links to crisis intervention sites above a link to continue to search results (Tumblr.com). This is a noble initiative because the website does not simply block inappropriate material; it offers customized help based on what the user is searching for. 

There is some controversy over if the website should still allow users to view search results like Tumblr does, this exemplifies the overall debate about whether social media is more beneficial or detrimental in regards to self-harm. On one hand, allowing users to view NSSI content facilitates the behavior; on the other hand, it has allowed the creation of a community. The online self-harm community is unbelievably close knit considering how heavily it relies on anonymity. Users share intimate secrets and create incredibly close bonds with each other, providing a much needed outlet for emotions and giving them the support and validation that they crave. If social media sites blocked all NSSI content, the community would be disbanded and that safe space would be destroyed. Teenagers would feel alone and misunderstood, most likely worsening their self-harm.

While social media sites do produce some beneficial effects, at this time there is not enough research and evidence to prove that the benefits outweigh the risks. The majority of popular sites do not promote positive and healing environments, instead they allow NSSI behavior to fester and spread. You don’t have to pour through research to understand the hopeless and discouraging tone of the general NSSI community. Simply logging on to any social media platform – YouTube for example – and searching for “self-harm” yields thousands of videos with millions of views. While most of these users warn others not to self-harm, they express a feeling of being stuck, often saying that they cannot stop even if they wanted too. This melancholy and hopeless attitude is infectious and is mirrored in many of the video comments (Hinduja). I'm not saying that self-harmers shouldn’t use social media; there are plenty of positive sites that promote healing, like the chat-site 7CupsOfTea, that focus on users listening to one another and helping each other work out problems in healthy and supportive ways. It is just that, at this time, social media sites are causing more harm than good. 
