Issue #4 - The one about Borderline Personality Disorder and Social Media
It had been barely 24 hours after our last issue was sent out and I was still trying to take that dose of knowledge in when I got a series of WhatsApp messages from Mahmuud. He started by expressing how much he loved the issue. He then talked about how he had an idea for what would be the perfect sequel to that issue. He pitched the idea and boy, was I in love with it. If love at first sight exists, then this was probably it. As such, this month’s newsletter comes in a dimension similar to the previous issue in that it was not written by the author of the newsletter. It was written by Mahmuud Olaide Ibrahim.
Mahmuud is studying to be a doctor at Marmara University. A believer in effective communication as a tool for transformative change, he employs both textual and visual resources to craft articles across several genres - psychology, history of math, biography, personal development, you name it. You can read his articles here.
“Necessity is the mother of invention.”
You have probably heard this, hundreds, if not thousands of time. And you may have your opinion as to whether it’s empirically true. But let’s just overlook that for now. Let’s tilt a little toward confirmational bias for the sake of this article.
Quite recently, some people seemed to be displeased by the presence of distracting objects such as phones at the dinner table. The dinner table is where members of the family interact with one another, not with their phones. However, this set of people observed quite the opposite and feared that if no step is taken to break free, our phones will continue to intrude on the family time we deem so precious. When innovation was necessary, Kitchen Safe was born. With Kitchen Safe, all distracting objects at the dinner table can be locked away for an amount of time specified on the safe’s timer. Until the time runs down to zero, none of the objects inside the safe can be taken out. Problem solved.
At least, that’s how it seemed until a kid invented a hack to take her phone out while the timer was still running. The Social Dilemma’s Isla is the youngest in a family of five. One night at the dinner table, her mom thought in order to enjoy their dinner with all five senses, the five phones at the table must be locked in the Kitchen Safe. She took all the phones and locked them in the safe. Barely a minute into dinner, Isla, under the pretense of getting another fork, attempted to open the safe. The attempt was unsuccessful. For someone who had to send about a thousand snaps out before dinner, giving up was not an option. She had another option though: break the safe with brute force. She did just that. She couldn’t wait until after dinner time to hop back on the social network.
Isla is you and me. We’d do anything just to get back on our social networks. But unlike people suffering from Snapchat Dysmorphia, we haven’t sought reconstructive surgery to look like our perfect filtered selfies we took on Snapchat. At least, not yet! According to an article by the Guardian, the term Snapchat Dysmorphia was coined by the cosmetic doctor Tijion Esho. “He had noticed that where patients had once brought in pictures of celebrities with their ideal noses or jaws, they were now pointing to photos of themselves.” They want bigger eyes with no tear trough. They want the removal of their naso-labial lines – the lines that run from the nose to the mouth on either side – because they don’t exist on their heavily edited selfies. They want every single marking of a normal human face taken out just to narrow the wide gap between their physical selves and the selves they created on Snapchat or Instagram.
Snapchat Dysmorphia is a manifestation of chronic addiction to social media. Even though it is a psychological addiction as opposed to substance addiction, brain scans of social media addicts and substance addicts show similar impairment in the same region of the brain. Since, according to Wikipedia, substance addiction is a common comorbidity in bipolar disorder, it’s safe to say social media addiction is a comorbidity too. During their manic episodes, people suffering from bipolar mood disorder may exhibit regrettable attitudes online. This can make them fall deeper into feelings of worthlessness, sadness and anger during their depressive episodes. So, suffering from both Bipolar Mood Disorder and social media addiction at the same time culminates in a worse prognosis.
Even though the exact mechanism underlying the disorder remains fuzzy, there are hypotheses that explain the disorder in part or whole. From a neurological standpoint, Bipolar Mood Disorder occurs when emotion is being perceived more than it’s being regulated. On social media, you may get exposed to a lot of emotion-triggering contents – from extreme ones, like cyber bullying, to subtle ones, like ‘like counts’. According to the Kindling Hypothesis, if people who are genetically predisposed to Bipolar Mood Disorder repeatedly experience stressful events – like, but not limited to, cyberbullying – the stress threshold at which mood changes becomes progressively lower until the episodes finally occur. With this logic, extreme and unchecked use of social media doesn’t only worsen the prognosis of people suffering from Bipolar Mood Disorder, but also makes those predisposed to it experience earlier than usual episodes. That is why in addition to methods like psychotherapy, experts often recommend abstinence from social media during the maintenance of bipolar disorder.
But is social media the almighty devil? Of course not! With social media, we can communicate seamlessly across the globe. With social media, we can reach out to mental health advocacy groups all over the world. A very good example is Mentally Aware Nigeria, an organization that champions optimal mental health for all. Also, people suffering from bipolar mood disorder can be part of an online community that supports them.
Social media, even with all its disadvantages, has unmatched benefits and it’s here to stay. But learning to effectively navigate it will go a long way in pushing its disadvantages into the background. Also, learning to stay at the midpoint while using social media is the best, especially for the most vulnerable among us.
That’s it for today. See you next month!
PS: Being the fourth issue, I think now would be a great time to let you in on a secret, or fun fact if you may. You have probably always wondered why the newsletter comes in on the fourth day of every month. Well, our thinking was to send it on the fourth in tandem with the fourth Sustainable Development Goal - Quality Education for all, since we plan to educate our readers with each issue.
We keep getting a lot of direct messages on social media telling us how much you love the newsletter, but it’s not translating unless you share. Please take some time to share the newsletter today if you enjoy it and be sure to leave a comment.