Is Promoting Wellbeing Online a Contradiction?
Part 1 of 'The Barbed Hook of Big Tech Capitalism'
*Note: I’ve recorded myself reading the essays if you prefer podcast style listening. Just click play on the voice over button above.
As a quick overview, I started off writing one essay on mental health and social media. It quickly grew into three. To a greater or lesser extend most of us have heard or felt that social media is tough on our mental health, so I’ve tried to look at aspects that many of us might not have considered before. Part 1 takes the onus and pressure off the individual suffering, and refocuses on the powerful nature of the social media beast. Part 1 also zooms in on social media usage for mental health professionals, or indeed anyone generally wanting to be a promoter of wellbeing. Part 2 looks at social media as a warped economic sink that we’re all entangled in. We are exchanging our creative and attention energy for vague, if any, returns. Part 3 works with the mythical story of Narcissus, to explore the relationship between character, giving and receiving love, depth of connection and intimacy, and how social media is blurring this feedback loop. Part 2 and 3 will come out roughly fortnightly.
For those of you for whom social media is part of your livelihood, keep up the good work. I hope my reflections do not come across as condoning your actions as an individual. We are all working with powerful systems around us, trying to do the best we can, even if sometimes this means making bargains with the devil. For some, being off of social media is now a luxury they cannot afford. That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. Some of my nearest and dearest’s career’s are totally hinged on social media. It’s not black and white, on or off.
OK, let’s get stuck in.
Are we disordered, or is it culture?
Humans are fundamentally social creatures. We live within a complex environment. Mental health disorders do not exist within a vacuum, they exist within an environmental context. The Power Threat Meaning Framework argues that it’s just as important, if not more, to look at the context the individuals reside in to explain their suffering. The framework argues that right now, the mental health world puts too much emphasis on the individual, and not enough on the context. It’s embedded right in the language we use: ‘Self-help’. To give a simple example, if my boat is sinking, it’s not myself that needs help. Fix the boat and my self will likely be much better.
There’s a blunt colloquial term for it, it’s called “Shit Life Syndrome”. It’s the accumulation of chronic socio-economic hardship, systemic cultural and worldly issues that penetrate all aspects of a person’s life. There are powerful forces that are eroding people’s physical and mental health. Everyone experiences different realities and different power structures, with some experiences overlapping from person to person. It’s not a matter of an individual being disordered, it’s the world around them that is not conducive to being well. If a person is experiencing mental health challenges, their expressions of suffering are often a siren that aspects of our society is disordered.
Social media is a power structure in our culture that exerts force onto individuals in so many ways. It enforces social norms, it encourages people to change their creative output and behaviour to fit the algorithms. The algorithms radicalise and polarise us with suggested content. It distracts people from their real life. It entices people to buy stuff. People irrevocably change their body image to garner attention. People will film anything in the real world and upload it with the chance of gaining popularity. Social media has parasitically woven it’s way into almost all aspects of our world. So many of us can’t even do our work without involving social media. We’ve almost lost the ability to organise ourselves and gather together without first going though Apple, Meta, TickTok, etc.
Looking more closely at the power structures doesn’t mean abdicating our personal responsibility. It means developing more compassion around the context that we find ourselves in. By taking the onus off the individual, we can say "yea, this stuff is really powerful, it is no wonder it's affecting us and our loved ones”. By acknowledging this, we can start to make sense of it, and decide if there’s any way we can change our behaviour. Hopefully this inquiry will lead to de-powering social media’s affect on us, and re-gaining some agency over our choice, and perhaps our well being.
I recently watched a short interview for Richard Dawkins’ new book. He puts it quite bluntly. Our technological environment is evolving too quickly. Our human minds cannot keep up. The soul doesn’t move this fast. He believes this is the ultimate reason why mental health issues are skyrocketing. From my own perspective growing up, the only way to call home was to put 20p in a phone box, call a memorised number, and hope someone is inside and available to pick up. Now we all have access to live maps, tracking the locations of all of our friends and family 24/7. Even just for us millennials the rate of progression is wild when you stop to think about it.
Social Media for Helping Professions
Let’s hold in mind this impact of power structures and the environmental context on wellbeing for a second. Although I’m zooming in on health professionals in particular, I believe this is relevant for any conscientious person who generally wants their actions in the world to foster mental health and wellbeing.
Helping professionals in particular have to think carefully about using social media. The emphasis I read is always on maintaining boundaries, protecting privacy, and upholding the reputation of the profession. Balancing all of these considerations, when I started out in 2020, I did what everyone else seemed to do. I joined the jamboree of social media, and followed a bunch of other therapists. In a matter of weeks I was so saturated with click-bate posts regurgitating self-help truisms I had to switch it all off and run to the hills. Here’s the crux of the issue I saw: therapists work with such strict confidentiality and online personal boundaries, there is not much we can really post about!
What a lot of therapist’s choose to do in light of the restriction is educate and share information. But this is not fool proof. I’ve read reports of client’s noticing their therapist using session material as inspiration for posts. Imagine having a session about your father in law, and then next week seeing ‘6 ways to cope with the in-laws’ appear on your therapist’s Facebook. Not cool. Even with the mental gymnastics of stripping away all client information, all identifiable features, and just talking about general themes, it’s still a breech of trust.
This poses a real challenge, because when you boil down artistic expression, it’s about being inspired by our experiences, and translating that into creative content. What all the professional rules of therapy creates is a giant wedge in this creative process. We have to be ultra careful to delineate our inspiration from our expression. I don’t think this is as easy as it appears. This conundrum has only amplified now that social media is a primary way to promote our businesses.
As an aside, Irvine Yalom is a great role model in this arena. He actively engages his clients in his writing, seeking permission for his creative expression to be a part of the therapy journey for the client. He is honest with his client’s when they inspire him. He would explore getting permission for anonymised versions of their stories to be incorporated into his books. Clients participated in the writing and editing process. This seems slower, more deliberate, more relational, and promoting of general wellbeing. This is a far cry from a quick obligatory post, a reshare or tweet to keep the algo’s happy at the end of a long week of client work.
OK. So being an online educator is one of the few options left for therapists. Let’s be honest with the current state of affairs with knowledge. If we need to know anything about mental health, we can google it, ask Chat GPT, jump on TickTok, etc. I am witnessing a generation coming through that are so knowledgeable about mental health because of this direct dissemination of the complex knowledge that was until recently stuffed away in textbooks. On the whole I think it’s great. However, there’s a caveat, in the form of a Deryk Sivver’s point: if knowledge was all we needed, why are we not all millionaires with six packs? Knowledge alone doesn't seem to be enough to solve the societal surge in mental health challenges. So if all the knowledge is already out there, and it’s not enough, what is the point of adding to that noisy space?
Promoting our work online
It’s hard for me to say, but us professionals who publish content to promote our businesses, we are just adding fuel onto the fire of screen addiction. Content creators, no matter how well intended, are part of the problem. In trying to grab your attention, we are facilitating the powerful social media firms to keep the population hooked on the platforms. I’m not even sure that longer form essays like this are immune to this criticism. Ultimately you’re still here on the tech engaging with this rather than out there in the real world. I’m clinging onto a faith that longer form writing and listening is a bit like books: it awakens a different mode of thinking and being compared to click bait scrolling.
Promoting wellbeing is a core principle and duty of what it means to be a therapist. The wellbeing of an individual is intrinsically linked to their contextual environment. So we have to ask ourselves whether posting quick form content online is contributing to an individual’s wellbeing, or if it’s self-serving our business needs and in doing so, keeping people hooked on the screens?
Posting short and frequent stuff to catch attention to promote our practice, arguably is the equivalent of enabling addicts. It’s fuelling the fire of the infinite scroll. It’s implicitly saying “I believe that social media is good for us, and good for our world. Stay on it and read about me and what I have to say!”. I think all the well intended content-posting-psycho-education-helping-people, whilst also a cheekily self-promotion wink wink, is hindering the larger problem of social media’s exertion of power over the individual.
I can hear my critiques as I write, “Yes Ben, but you posted this essay on Facebook and Linkedin, you are part of the problem too”. One of my thought hero’s Jaron Lanier would totally agree with you. He argues the only true solution is to just get off it all completely, right now, and figure out how to live without it. I can only justify myself through metaphor. Writing about this and still promoting the essays on social media is like walking into the bar and saying “Hey guys, I think we need to quit drinking”. Sometimes to enact systemic change, we need to work from within the system, even though we know it’s fraught. Lanier talks about people entirely off social media being custodians for a way existing that is quickly being lost to us all.
A big part of me yearns to become one of these custodians.