Researchers believe that people — often adolescent girls and young women — are acquiring symptoms via posts from social media influencers
When patients show up exhibiting symptoms in an unusual manner or with an unusual backstory, even experienced psychologists, psychiatrists and family doctors may not realize their illness is not what it seems.
While it is possible that these are all conversion phenomena, there is also some evidence ... that these may be deliberately manufactured “While it is possible that these are all conversion phenomena, there is also some evidence — though thus far only explicated in the lay press — that these may be deliberately manufactured, or a form of factitious disorder,” writes Giedinghagen in her paper, published in the journal Child Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry.Article content
A famous historical example is the dancing plague that afflicted people periodically between the 14th and 17th centuries, when Europeans broke out into fits of mad dancing with no obvious explanation. Musicians attempted to play music to dance it out of them, but this only brought others to join in. Priests performed exorcisms. Some people even danced until they died. To this day, it’s not clear exactly what caused this — but one theory is that it was a case of mass psychogenic illness.
The theory Giedinghagen develops — which she calls social media associated abnormal illness behaviour — combines a few of these explanations. The first is that there’s some degree of mass psychogenic illness, which would basically be people acquiring conversion disorders from this content. This may, in recent years, be due to pandemic stress. But also, there may be some people showing factitious disorders, either seeking attention in an unhealthy way or perhaps even financial gain.
So, why? Why, in the case of people faking a pregnancy or a cancer diagnosis? And, why, in the case of teenagers seemingly developing tics out of nowhere and posting about them on social media?“From a psychological point of view, teenagers really need to identify in groups when they’re in that stage of life,” says Sofia Sebben, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Waterloo.
“Everybody who’s sick does want a little time and attention and care, and that’s reasonable. It’s only when it becomes willfully deceptive and emerges as a serious pattern of behaviour and an individual may feel, even to the person, compulsive or addictive, which are words they often use, do we worry about it being Munchausen syndrome,” says Feldman.
Of course, that support can disappear — quickly. Unlike a psychologist, the internet has no real qualms about accusing people of lying about their mental health. Jasmine Zhang, a PhD student in clinical psychology at the University of Waterloo who’s studying digital media and mental health, notes that while these groups are tracking down “cringe diagnoses,” people need to be careful because the people might be legitimately suffering.
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