Abstract
In the 1970s and 1980s, public health professionals increasingly focused on the figure of the troubled teenager, who they constructed as at risk of mass-media-provoked suicide contagion. Teenagers’ increased exposure to media today and such attendant problems as cyberbullying and harassment have inspired social media corporations to develop mental health tools meant to arrest the diminution of well-being their sites may create. The chapter argues that such tools naturalize communications media as an entry to mental health practices that view mental health as biological, diminishing attention to promoting social and community structures of care; that they participate in a general biopolitics of slow death, where only certain populations are marked out for intervention and rehabilitation; and that the use of natural language processing and other quantitative methods of analyzing messages on social media imposes biological understandings for mental health onto people’s expressions of frustration with their sociopolitical environment.
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Notes
- 1.
For a concise summary of these responses, see Schroeder, R. (2014) Big Data and the brave new world of social media research, Big Data & Society, 1(2). Panger, G. (2014) Why the facebook experiment is such lousy social science. ischool.ucberkley.edu. Available at: http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/news/20140828facebookexperiment (Accessed: 10 October 2015). Panger, G. (2014), “Why Experiment Is Lousy Social Science the Facebook,” Tufecki, Z. (2014), “Facebook and Engineering the Public.” Tufecki, Z. (2014) Facebook and Engineering the Public. Medium.com. Available at: https://medium.com/message/engineering-the-public-289c9139022 (Accessed: 2015 10 October).
- 2.
See Rosenberg, M. L., Smith, J. C., Davidson, L. E. and Conn, J. M. (1987) The emergence of youth suicide: an epidemiologic analysis and public health perspective, Annual Review Public Health, 8, pp. 417–40.
- 3.
The 1977 article is Ward, J. A. and Fox, J. (1977) A suicide epidemic on an Indian reserve, Canadian Psychiatric Association journal, 22(8), pp. 423–6. Other work attempting to sort out contagion in reference to youth suicide during this time period include, among others: Robbins, D. and Conroy, R. C. (1983) A cluster of adolescent suicide attempts: is suicide contagious?, Journal of adolescent health care, 3(4), pp. 253–5, Gould, M. S. and Davidson, L. (1988) Suicide Contagion among Adolescents, Advances in Adolescent Mental Health, 3(4), pp. 29–59, Gould, M. S., Wallenstein, S. and Davidson, L. (1989) Suicide Clusters: A Critical Review, Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, 19(1), pp. 17–29.
- 4.
Editorials and articles using the phrase include Palo Alto Staff (2015a) Editorial: Around teen well-being, the vocabulary changes. Available at: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/02/20/editorial-around-teen-well-being-the-vocabulary-changes (Accessed: 16 August 2015), Palo Alto Staff (2015c) Editorial: While Explanations Elude, We Should Not Be Deterred from Action. Available at: http://paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/01/30/editorial-while-explanations-elude-we-should-not-be-deterred-from-action (Accessed: 16 August 2015), Palo Alto Staff (2015b) Editorial: The ‘Zero Period’ Hypocrisy. Available at: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/03/13/editorial-while-preaching-the-value-of-sleep-high-schools-quietly-offer-early-classes (Accessed: 16 August 2015), Kadvany, E. (2015) Can Social Media Play a Role in Youth Suicide Prevention? (Accessed: 16 August 2016). Comments using the phrase can be found in Sorensen, C. (2015) Guest Opinion: In Defense of Zero Period — and Choice. Available at: http://paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/03/17/guest-opinion-in-defense-of-zero-period-151-and-choice (Accessed: 16 August 2015), Winslow, D. and Parsonnet, J. (2015) Guest Opinion: School Needs More Limits on Courseload. Available at: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/01/31/guest-opinion-school-needs-more-limits-on-courseload. (Accessed: 16 August 2015).
- 5.
See Joshi, S. V., Ojakian, M., Lenoir, L., Hartley, S. and Weitz, E. (2014) Comprehensive Suicide Prevention Toolkit for Schools. Available at: http://pausd-web.pausd.org/parents/services/health/documents/ComprehensiveSuicidePreventionToolkitforSchools.pdf. (Accessed: 16 August 2015). http://pausd-web.pausd.org/parents/services/health/documents/ComprehensiveSuicidePreventionToolkitforSchools.pdf.
- 6.
See Meadow, T. (2012) Queer Children Are Dying... But Many More Are Living, Huffington Post. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tey-meadow-jd-phd/gay-suicide_b_1218124.html (Accessed 16 August 2015), Bazelon, E. (2011) How Not To Prevent Bullying, Slate. Available at: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/bulle/2011/04/how_not_to_prevent_bullying.html (Accessed 16 August 2015), Codera-Rado, A. (2012) Using Social Media to Prevent Suicide, The Atlantic. Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/using-social-media-to-prevent-suicide/256069/ (Accessed 16 August 2015).
- 7.
The screens can be seen at https://vimeo.com/120520232.
- 8.
These criticisms have been aired around the “It Gets Better” campaign, for example in Nyong’o, T. (2010) School Daze. Available at: bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/school-daze (Accessed: 20 August 2015), Halberstram, J. (2010) It Gets Worse, Social Text: Periscope, 8 October 2015. Available at: http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/it_gets_worse/, Puar, J. K. (2012) Coda: The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 18(1), pp. 149–158.
- 9.
The backlash was heavy enough that the Facebook researcher involved in the study, Adam Kramer, posted a defense and apology for it to his own Facebook page. See Kramer, A. (2014). Facebook. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/akramer/posts/10152987150867796 (Accessed: 8 October 2015).
- 10.
This is a typical way such articles begin: “Mental illness is a leading cause of disability worldwide. It is estimated that nearly 300 million people suffer from depression (World Health Organization 2001).” World Health Organization (2001) The World Health Report 2001: Mental health: new understanding, new hope. World Health Organization.
- 11.
For more about this slogan, see Staub, M. E. (2015) Madness is civilization: when the diagnosis was social, 1948-1980, Cvetkovich, A. (2012) Depression: a public feeling. Durham: Duke University Press.
- 12.
http://www.samaritansradar.org, no longer available.
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Banner, O. (2016). Immunizing the Social Network: Public Health and the “Troubled Teenager” in Digital Media. In: Nixon, K., Servitje, L. (eds) Endemic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52141-5_5
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