Summary: New research shows a strong link between high social media use and mental disorders, including delusions such as narcissism and physical dismorphia. Conditions such as narcissistic personality disorders, anorexia, and physical dysmorphic disorders thrive on social platforms, allowing users to build and maintain distorted self-awareness without any actual checks.
The study highlights that virtual environments can allow users to escape social scrutiny, enhance delusional self-image and exacerbate existing mental health issues. Researchers emphasize that while social media is not inherently harmful, an immersive virtual environment combined with real isolation can significantly amplify unhealthy mental states.
Important Facts:
Delusional disorder: High use of social media is strongly correlated with disorders such as narcissistic personality disorder, heterogeneous disorders, erotomania, and loss of anorexia. Self-presentation problem: Social media allows users to maintain unrealistic, self-enhancing identity without reality-based screws. Mitigates harmful psychological effects.
Source: Simon Fraser University
A new study from researchers at Simon Fraser University found a close relationship between high levels of social media use and mental disorders with delusions such as narcissism and dysmorphic disorders.
A systematic review of all available academic literature, including scrutiny of more than 2,500 publications on social media use and mental disorders – was the most common type of mental disorder in which forms of delusion are associated with high social media use.
These disorders include narcissistic personality disorder (delusions of dominance), erotomania (delusions of famous people loving you), dysplastic disorders of the body (delusions of defects in parts of the body), and loss of appetite (delusions about body size).
“Social media creates conditions that allow delusions to be more easily generated and maintained due to the presence of platforms and apps that address the causes of disorders, as well as the lack of effective reality checks,” says Bernard Crespi, SFU’s Biological Sciences and Canadian Research Chair of Evolutionary Genetics and Psychology.
“This study has important implications for the causes and symptoms of mental illness, and how can they exacerbate how they are exacerbated by online social platforms?”
According to the author, social media itself is not inherently a problem, but the virtual world, coupled with social isolation in “real life,” creates an environment in which people can maintain a paranoid sense of self-identity without scrutiny.
Social media can have positive benefits through the ability to create communities and help people feel more united, but Cresspi and his co-author Nancy Yang argue that high-risk individuals are often negatively affected by high-school social media use.
They also point out that many popular apps and platforms can maintain and exacerbate mental and physical delusions by allowing self-presentation in self-promoting, but inaccurate ways.
The significant differences between online and face-to-face social interactions (where people are more likely to suppress their delusions through physical and emotional reality) exacerbate the departure from mental well-being, he adds.
The study concludes that people with disabilities with high levels of delusions benefit from reducing social media use. We also need to do more research into the specific characteristics of social media that promotes delusions and helps make online social interactions more grounded and realistic lives.
To achieve this, researchers cite the possibilities of eye contact techniques, 3D perspectives, avatars and other immersive technologies.
About this psychology and delusional disorder research news
Author: Matt Kiertica
Source: Simon Fraser University
Contact: Matt Kieltyka – Simon Fraser University
Image: Image credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Open access.
“I tweet, so I: a systematic review of social media use and social brain disorders,” Bernard Crespi et al. BMC Psychiatry
Abstract
I’m tweeting so I’m: A systematic review of social media use and social brain disorders
Rapid technological advances have made social media a daily social interaction among humans. For the first time in evolutionary history, people can interact in virtual spaces where temporal, spatial, and embodied cues are separated from each other.
What do these recent changes have on social cognitive phenotypes and psychiatric disorders?
We conducted a systematic review of the relationship between social media use and mental disorders, including the social brain.
The main findings show evidence of an increased social media use in individuals with a spectral phenotype of psychosis, especially the basic self, in particular individuals with disabilities characterized by changes in narcissism, dysomyopathy, and eating disorders.
These findings can be understood in the context of a new conceptual model called here “Social Media’s Delusional Amplification.” This involves this set of disorders and symptoms involving a central form of mental delusion.
In particular, in conjunction with the “real life” social isolation that inhibits formation and promotes virtual social interactions, an inconsistent self-awareness of underdeveloped development can lead to the use of social media, and maintain a more or less paranoid sense of self-identity.
The delusions involved can be mental (like narcissism and erotomania) or somatic cells (including the whole body or certain body parts, such as atypical and eating disorders of the body).
In both cases, the virtuality of social media promotes delusion. Because the self is defined and reinforced in this highly spiritual environment, it can largely avoid realistic exposure to delusions.
Current evidence also suggests that the use of social media may be related to spectral phenotypes, particularly delusional, that lead to decoupling of cues within integral entities and ambiguity of other boundaries between self, through the embodied isolated nature of reality.
