Hendricks 1

Marcus Hendricks
9 November 2016
Professor Campbell
UWRT 1103
The Online Hive Mind: Is mental illness becoming a social fad?
I hate myself, I want to die, my life sucks: these are messages that many
teenagers send around frequently. For most its a distasteful joke but for others they
pander these messages as their true ideas and feelings. Social media platforms such
as Twitter or Facebook allow for these messages to be spread very quickly and be
glorified by a mass public. Getting attention from others has never been easier than
through indulging in a fraudulent mental illness. Along with most other movements, the
movement to get people suffering from mental illness has gone too far and has begun to
effect people that it was not initially meant to effect. Now, you see more and more selfdiagnosis of depression, gender dysphoria, and mental illnesses.
This dilemma is very harmful to the community of people who are genuinely
seeking help from mental illnesses. This phenomenon has become such a big problem
that many people that are sick will choose to not let others know. This apparent need to
hide ones illness stems from people not believing them since so many people already
claim the same problem. This artificial dilution of the mentally ill population does the
opposite of supplying awareness. This dilution creates an effect similar to the boy who
cried wolf. If many teenagers are simply faking it, then what makes your disease any
more real?

Hendricks 2

How are so many people able to claim that they are depressed, have bad
anxiety, or bipolar disorder? This answer lies with the internet, or more specifically,
WebMD. Websites like this allow for you to input your symptoms and out comes a list of
possible conditions ordered by possibilities. This technology leads to a new illness
dubbed cyberchondria. This word is a play off of hypochondria, which is an anxiety
disorder, as described by Digital Right Group Limited, in which someone thinks that they
are inflicted by many ailments off of only a few symptoms. With the internet everyone
thinks that they are an expert and many people will attempt to diagnose themselves.
This is a very harmful process because once someone is headstrong that they have a
certain condition, they will most likely attempt to exaggerate their symptoms.
Could Social Media itself be the issue? In a paper called Association Between
Social Media Use And Depression Among U.S. Young Adults, adults were studied to
see how social media effects their happiness. Depression in young adults is increasing
every year. 1,787 young adults between the ages 19 and 32 were questioned as part of
this research. The questions were based on the most popular social media platforms.
On all of the adults studied about 60 minutes of social media was being logged on
average and one-fourth of those studied were said to have high indicators of
depression. Adults who rarely went on social media, versus those who went on social
media frequently saw a 2.7 times increase in their depressive qualities. Many factors
were kept at a minimum in order to study on the effects on social media and depression.
The reason for this increase in depression is linked to the amount of glamorization you
are subjecting yourself to. While you browse your preferred media, what you are looking
at isnt a persons normal day to day life, but a highlight of all of their greatest moments.

Hendricks 3

Because of this, people will begin to compare their life with other peoples filtered,
glamorized lives. The overall consequence of this makes your life seem uneventful,
which could then lead to signs of depression. Another cause could be that simply going
on social media may in turn make people feel like they arent making any meaningful
impact with their life and in cause negatively affect their mood. Finally, there is also the
possibility that a person is being bullied online which would also lead to depressive
behaviors.
Will Willes wrote an article describing an experiment called Universe 25. This
experiment was meant to simulate a utopian society, something that humanity is striving
for. In this experiment mice were placed into a large area where they would be allowed
to expand and socialize. Every mouse was given food and water, and threats of
predators were also taken away. As expected this colony grew exponentially and they
began to create social groups. After generations their population began to stagnate.
Even though the housing could contain 3,000 mice an invisible barrier was preventing
this progress. Instead the mice only reached a population of 2,200. It was shocking to
find that even with unlimited food and water, the mice became uncontrollable. Even in a
utopia the mice eventually resorted to violence to settle territory disputes. Many mice
could be seen with badly bitten tails from fights. This chaos also caused mice to resort
to cannibalism and murder, even though they were all going to be guaranteed to get
food and water they still preferred to kill for port. Finally, and they most import reason
why their population stagnated would be because the mices sexual orientation
changed. Now, many mice in the enclosure were becoming pansexual, meaning that
they would have sex with anyone, male or female. I think that this experiment reflects

Hendricks 4

the future of humanity pretty accurately. If we continue on this path, and our youth is
approaching less and less hardships, then there will be rendering them void of conflict.
Without conflict and obstacles our youth may become understimulized and begin to
exhibit the signs of chaos that we see in Universe 25.
It is extremely important that we control how the youth is perceiving mental
illness. By perpetuating this fad of being a victim for attention is undermining all of the
hard work that institutions of put forth in the help of the mentally handicapped and
mentally ill. Many people with real problems are running away from help causing them
to make their problem even worse, all because their illness has been demeaned by
thousands of teenagers on social media.

Hendricks 5

Works Cited
Hypochondriacs: Inside Health Anxiety Disorder. Hypochondriacs: Inside Health Anxiety
Disorder. Digital Right Group Limited, 2007. Web. 19 Oct. 2016.
Lin, Liu Yi, Jaime E. Sidani, Ariel Shensa, Ana Radovic, Elizabeth Miller, Jason B.
Colditz, Beth L. Hoffman, Leila M. Giles, and Brian A. Primack. "Association Between Social
Media Use And Depression Among U.s. Young Adults." Depression and Anxiety Depress Anxiety
33.4 (2016): 323-31. Web. 18 Oct. 2016.
Wiles, Will. "The Behavioral Sink." CABINET //. N.p., 2012. Web. 05 Nov. 2016.