A Trauma Informed Lens on Social Media and Mental Health (Part 1)
We are in a time where many straddle the lines of being both avid users of social media and swearing them off for life, between worlds of deleting the apps entirely or downloading new apps with self imposed timers. We live in a time where we hear the phrase, “more connected than ever and yet more alone.” The global mental health crisis is felt through the month long waiting lists for a therapist appointment, the burn out of mental health workers as the ratio of clients per therapists increase, and the 20 years “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk has remained on the New York Times Best-Selling List. People all around the world are continually coming online (for better or for worse) and its inverse relationship to health is becoming direly apparent.
The impact of social media’s role on global mental health is a headlining topic these days, coming across the tables of top state officials and frequent in conversations around global safety. As someone who works in the field of trauma, there is a lens that I take to this topic that I’d like to share.
My opinions come from a combination of years of trauma study, plant medicines, and my own lived experience through healing. For this exploration, we’ll stroll through a three part series on 1) the beginnings of our sympathetic nervous system and its technological manifestation into social media, 2) exploring trauma perspectives and seeing media through its lens and 3) where we are now and a path to better times.
Part 1: The Beginning and The Dilemma
Since our early days, our systems have been wired to pay closer attention to potential threats over the mundane, to pick up on the scary over the beautiful. This feature helped the human race survive. For example, pay attention to the lion coming at you before a pretty rainbow in the sky. Makes sense, you’ll want to avoid the lion before enjoying the rainbow, lest you are eaten and cease to enjoy the beauties of life.
So understandably with the advent of technology, we have designed systems outside of us to do that very thing — alert us of threats, and with the rapidity that technology enables. Now we have as many media outlets as there are iPhones and social media platforms like twitter broadcasting to us at every moment.
These days, the threats look a bit different. We are no longer tracking the lion and instead criminals down the street (or across the world), viruses in your local preschool to ones crossing species lines, and any and everything Donald Trump says. Social media has become the global loudspeaker for the human race to track everything that might pose a threat, all at once, coming at you in your living room, bedroom, bathroom, and pocket, whether you’re eating dinner, having sex, or sleeping. Ideally, this would be in hopes that it may serve us so when there isn’t a threat we can go about and look at the rainbows. However, that moment never seems to come. The feature has become a bug.
To take a meander into the spiritual philosophy of Deepak Chopra,
“The physical universe is nothing other than the Self curving back within Itself to experience Itself as spirit, mind, and physical matter.”
We have created our very own Plato’s cave upon which we watch all the shadows we cast upon the wall and magnify. And now, instead of wandering outside of the cave to breathe in the fresh air, we are transfixed on the living nightmares that become what we perceive to be all of life. Social media has become the reflection of our psyche’s greatest fears (and everything else you might find exploring the abyss of the human collective mind). The incessant, pinging, ringing, lighting up our phones, follows us to the bathrooms and furthest corners of the world, we can’t escape it. We are seeped in the dangers and trauma of every human being that can tweet and our nervous systems are fried.
The complication lies here: The very systems we created to alert us to danger have become the very lion we are trying to escape. So it makes sense the stuckness of the predicament we are in. We feed the machine the very things we are afraid of to better alert the masses which then perpetuates the story that haunts us. We lose sight of where one ends and one begins. We don’t know what to choose, ourselves or the system. We can’t get rid of it because we’ve relied on it to live. And it is killing us.