We’ve all had those friends on Twitter: the ones who have like 30.5k tweets and maybe 7,000 followers. Why are they tweeting so often? What are they tweeting about? Who are they tweeting at? It’s like Every. Single. Thought. is put in a tweet.
Usually, it’s a complaint! Have you noticed that? We reckon whingers on Twitter only whinge because their negativity is validated via their friends/followers. It definitely makes complainers feel better about their complaining.
Then there are those people on Facebook who entirely over-share their deepest feelings in massive paragraph-length status updates. Cringe.
And what about those people who update their status with ‘perfect life’ updates? ‘Glass of red, love of my life, sofa, Downton Abbey’ type things. Hashtag happy, hashtag blessed, right? How about hashtag TMI?
Don’t even get us started on the the incessant Instagramming from ‘the most fun party ever’ – which usually means you’ve missed 30 minutes of real-life fun taking a photo, choosing the right filter, perfecting your caption, etc. Here’s a tip: a latergram is a better idea.
The reality is that social media life is not real life, but for some people it becomes real. An article in the new issue of The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease says that our use of Twitter can ‘aggravate or even induce psychotic symptoms’ in users.
The study focuses on a 31-year-old patient in Berlin who had a mental breakdown after becoming obsessed with Twitter. The woman literally spent hours a day on her feed, reading and sending Tweets and eventually starting to believe a famous actor was sending her secret messages in his Tweets, using a secret code. She believed the messages said she had tasks to carry out.
She then started to see coded messages in other people’s Tweets, and from there started to hear this code in her real-life interactions with people.
The report says: ‘She then began to feel that there must be some organisation behind these tasks and started to suspect a sect, pointing to the development of systematised paranoid delusion.’
Although this woman had no history of mental issues prior to being committed, the doctors involved in the study believe Twitter can incite psychosis in people who are predisposed to mental illness. Eeek!
Apparently, a combination of ‘the amount of symbolic language (caused by the limitation of 140 characters per Twitter message), the automated spam responses with seemingly related content, and the general interactive features of Twitter might combine several aspects that could induce or further aggravate psychosis.’
So, if someone appears to have a rather serious dependency on the social network, then perhaps it’s more than just a minor internet addiction. Er, should we be worried?
Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.