Social Media and Self Harm: The Need to ‘Do Something’
thesociologicalreview.com
thesociologicalreview.com
When there is the opportunity, I try to make comments that validate people in a way that doesn't promote or encourage self harm, suicide attempts, etc.
I've attempted suicide. I know a fair amount about such issues.
No, shutting down the conversation isn't a good move. Instead, we need to promote best practices that make such conversations more constructive.
It can be done.
The moment you wake up in the morning, you have some idea whether you're going to have an 'easy day' or a 'difficult day'. From that point on, it's a constant battle against your own mind, trying to avoid letting things become a 'bad day'. If you stub your toe on the door frame leaving your bedroom, your day is now a 'bad day' and you have 12 hours of mental struggle to look forward to. You haven't even had the opportunity to find out the clothes you wanted to wear aren't clean, that you're out of milk so you have to have toast for breakfast. You haven't had a chance to drop your spoon on the floor, or accidentally slam the cupboard too loudly. You haven't made it to work or school yet where you'll have to deal with all your least favourite people. And every one of these things makes your day harder, and harder, until you can't hold it back, and all of a sudden you're being held hostage by your own mind. Shit is already hard before you get to social media. Sure, social media probably contributes, but so many things contribute, you cannot eliminate them all.
Feelings come from somewhere. When I try to engage people, I try to address root causes of feelings. I don't try to massage their feelings or something like that.
Most people either try to somehow stop the outpouring of negative feelings or respond by countering it with an outpouring of positives because their entire focus is the feelings. This tends to go bad places for everyone involved and one danger is that if everyone is nice to you when you are openly whining about being suicidal, that may actively "reward" you for being suicidal.
People who are suicidal are often people who are being generally treated like shit on a routine basis by a lot of the people around them. So being nice to them only when they are openly suicidal actively encourages suicidal ideation. Most people are too clueless to make an effort to find opportunities to engage them positively that don't promote suicidal feelings.
In addition to positives acting in a way that can prolong a mental illness, often they can also deepen it as well. Generally you're aware of what you could be, or should be, or want to be, but can't be and don't understand why. This in itself can trigger negative thoughts and reinforce the cycle.
But I feel like I failed to communicate something. Let me give a few examples from actual conversations I've had:
Someone was talking about having recently self harmed again after x amount of time refraining. They were saying they felt so ashamed and like such a failure, that refraining for so long had been a big accomplishment.
I told them it was still a big accomplishment. That fact remained true and was in no way diminished by their recent self harm.
Someone who is incredibly sweet and interesting and knowledgeable has a lot of baggage. When their baggage trips them up, they don't know how to stop and the kind, supportive replies they get keep the drama rolling. It is complicated by an "either/or" framing of certain things.
A couple of times, I've managed to say a thing that largely stopped the drama. They then took a break and did me time activities. When they "came back," they were much more able to focus on things other than their own baggage and emotional drama.
In short, I've put down a lot of baggage. I sometimes can help other people put down the baggage.
That's my focus. If they drop the baggage, their emotional landscape changes.
Because feelings come from somewhere.
First they came for the states by broadening the interstate commerce clause far beyond any rational reading. And now congress has ceded its authority in key areas such as treaties (fast tracking), declarations of war, and in process now: the right to subpoena information (we'll see how this one turns out).
I think too many people take for granted the stability and continuation of a system of government.
However the backstop is the no confidence vote which operates like impeachment. This is not a theoretical power but is exercised relatively frequently in parliamentarian systems. Failure to pass a budget is also by default a no confidence vote making it very rare one isn't passed. I think deep down the US feels that as well. The democracies they have created throughout the world do not mirror the US system of government.
The problem we face today with the US centralizing power in the presidency is that impeachment is seen as a "nuclear option" and therefore is not an effective backstop.
The basic problem currently in the American system is overpowered political parties which didn't fit in to the original set of checks and balances. It isn't clear if there is a simple amendment which could fix the system or if it is more of a social problem.
> I think deep down the US feels that as well. The democracies they have created throughout the world do not mirror the US system of government.
Well, that assumes those decisions are made solely with the best interests of the people in those democracies in mind.
Callaghan was the last PM to lose a no-confidence vote, but that's not the full story. Major and Brown resigned after losing an election, but Thatcher, Blair and Cameron all resigned as PM. May is expected to resign before the next general election. No US president has resigned since Nixon in 1974, which suggests a marked difference in security of tenure under the different systems - we might not kick our prime minister out of office very often, but they usually leave office of their own volition.
For an example of what this looks like refer to the Sargent at Arms arresting someone in possession of Facebook documents the UK parliament wanted: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/24/mps-seize...
Apple could certainly do more to facilitate MDM, but a phone known for letting your parents track your GPS and MITM your communications would not prove popular with the kids.
In the end the parents are the ones provisioning the device, paying the phone bill and are ultimately responsible for both it and its user...yet they have no administrative privileges over anything of relevance.
By all logic children should never be given access to fully-encrypted black boxes.
Many parents are abusive. Many children are discovering a sexuality or identity that their parents would find unacceptable.
In these cases, and many more, ensuring that the parents can read every single message their children send—and every single website they access—is much more likely to lead to serious negative outcomes for the children (at best, a repressed identity; at worst, suicide due to having one's self rejected by one's parents).
Maybe privacy-respecting tech is one of many solutions to bad parenting. Though I suspect getting to know ones neighbors well would be a far more effective first step.
Also, if most or all phones respect the child's privacy, it becomes harder for the parents to get their child a phone that lets them micromanage the child's life.
It doesn't serve their interests either if in their search for identity, they end up bullied or exploited to suicide in secret by their peers.
Either way, I get what you're saying, it just sucks that FAANG reserves the right to know our children better than we ever will.
And they do make one of the more popular types of phone...
Many states allow minors to receive mental health treatment without the consent of their parents and allow those minors to retain confidentiality.
In that context, the English rules abuot medical treatment seem useful. Someone the age of 16 or over is assumed to have capacity to make medical decisions by themselves (and there's complex law to regulate if they're thought to lack that capacity). Someone under 15 or under can also have that capacity: the doctor would need to check if the patient is Gillick Competent.
I am of the opinion that we should give significant credence to a minor over the age of, say, eight who says "I do not trust my parents to act in my best interests." This may generally involve having a qualified doctor or social worker evaluate the child's best interests instead of making the child decide, but at least a doctor or a social worker, unlike a parent, had qualifications to evaluate the options and has no conflict of interest unlike a parent.
I submitted it because it's currently the best available piece advancing this position. Regulation will come, and if people don't want that regulation they'll need to develop much better arguments than this.