Contemporary epidemiology of mental health

1 De-shaming mental health

2 Prevalence inflation hypothesis

Dark placebos. Is too much mental health messaging leading to actual increased levels of mental illness? (Foulkes and Andrews 2023)

3 Social media

Do screens drive us crazy?

4 Munchausen syndrome

At the extreme end of mental health contagion is the mental illness where you claim to have other (possibly mental) illnesses. Notes on manufacturing debilities, who does it.

Stuart Ritchie on Munchausen’s

[…]there is definitely a new genre of social media account which the owner uses to provide regular updates on what’s often a long list of medical conditions. They post photos of medical equipment such as feeding tubes, and seem to be take a suspicious amount of pleasure in the trials and tribulations of having a long-term medical condition.

Just to be completely clear, I’m not arguing that disability advocates who discuss their conditions and raise awareness on social media are suffering from Munchausen’s. But clearly, in some cases, the internet can become a crucial crutch for a minority who have a tendency to exaggerate (or even fake) symptoms. Indeed, thinking of the often-perverse dynamics of who gets attention on social media, one could hardly imagine this not being the case.

• Helen Lewis, Krug, Carrillo, Dolezal: Social Munchausen Syndrome

What if people don’t just invent medical symptoms to get attention—what if they feign oppression, too?

5 Incoming

Pundits worrying about recreational mental illness:

• Anne-Sophie Bine, Social Media Is Redefining ‘Depression’ - The Atlantic
• Marcella Rick, Why are we romanticising mental illness?
• We need to stop making mental illness look cool on social media

6 References