When I was growing up, parents could often be overheard mourning the plight of teenagers who had “fallen in with a bad crowd”. You don’t hear that expression anymore, because in terms of peer groups that encourage dangerous, immoral and criminal behaviour, there’s only really one “bad crowd” to worry about: social media.
This virtual crowd doesn’t just target fragile or troubled teens, but children of any age and mindset from the second they’ve been introduced. And when it comes to identifying a child’s particular vulnerabilities and bating them accordingly, social media’s a hell of a lot more wily and insistent than some clique of attention-seeking teenage reprobates – and able to use state-of-the-art technologies to push even the most well-adjusted young minds over the edge.
British teen Molly Russell (14) had shown no signs of mental illness before she killed herself 14 months ago. In an interview on Sunday, her distraught father, Ian, described his youngest child as a “gorgeous” and “caring” girl who loved horse riding and sailing, and had just won the lead role in the school play.
Police discovered half-a-dozen mournful notes and a short story about a little sailing boat succumbing to a storm that suggested Molly might have struggled with bouts of depression, but I and every friend I’ve discussed this with wrote similar things at Molly’s age, when dips of depression and passive suicidal thoughts and ‘fantasies’ can be normal – and fleeting.
We’ll never know how fleeting Molly’s thoughts were, because something made her act on them before she was given the chance to work through the tangle. That something, her family found out after a year of trying to get Apple to unlock her iPhone and iPod Touch, was the relentless succession of material on self-harm, suicide, depression and anxiety she was able to view online. These included photographs and suggestions too graphic to describe here.
Now whereas many of these images were algorithms, some Molly will have accessed ‘voluntarily’. And it’s true that a wider culture of glorifying mental illness and suicide is also to blame here. After all, we’re living through a curious period when girls choose to wear T-shirts emblazoned with phrases like “F***ed Up” and “I’ve got issues”, one of the most popular teen series online is ’13 Reasons Why’ – and “hot messes” are covetable enough to make Hollywood producers commission not one but two Zelda Fitzgerald biopics at the same time.
But Ian Russell now knows that in the weeks leading up to his daughter’s death, Molly witnessed “many graphic images of self-harm, though not the one headed ‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished I was dead’ Pinterest sent to her email address a month after she killed herself.
So when this father says sites such as Instagram and Pinterest “helped kill his daughter”, he’s not wildly looking around for someone to blame: he’s found those to blame.
And with the help of the UK government and Papyrus – a suicide prevention charity that has now been contacted by 30 families who believe social media was a factor in their children’s suicides – he is valiantly trying to ensure no family has to go through a pain like theirs again.
But companies like these are very good at wringing their hands and doing nothing. They’ll point out, as the Northern European vice president of Facebook (which owns Instagram) did in response to Molly’s death, that alongside the appalling images she viewed, Molly also looked at a greater number of positive posts attempting to help her. Which is a bit like saying that a photograph of a hanged teenager (available to children as young as 13 on Pinterest until recently) can be offset by 20 pictures of kittens. (© Daily Telegraph London)
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Celia Walden: 'Social media plays toxic role in pushing vulnerable teens towards suicide'
Celia Walden: 'Social media plays toxic role in pushing vulnerable teens towards suicide'
When I was growing up, parents could often be overheard mourning the plight of teenagers who had “fallen in with a bad crowd”. You don’t hear that expression anymore, because in terms of peer groups that encourage dangerous, immoral and criminal behaviour, there’s only really one “bad crowd” to worry about: social media.
This virtual crowd doesn’t just target fragile or troubled teens, but children of any age and mindset from the second they’ve been introduced. And when it comes to identifying a child’s particular vulnerabilities and bating them accordingly, social media’s a hell of a lot more wily and insistent than some clique of attention-seeking teenage reprobates – and able to use state-of-the-art technologies to push even the most well-adjusted young minds over the edge.
British teen Molly Russell (14) had shown no signs of mental illness before she killed herself 14 months ago. In an interview on Sunday, her distraught father, Ian, described his youngest child as a “gorgeous” and “caring” girl who loved horse riding and sailing, and had just won the lead role in the school play.
Police discovered half-a-dozen mournful notes and a short story about a little sailing boat succumbing to a storm that suggested Molly might have struggled with bouts of depression, but I and every friend I’ve discussed this with wrote similar things at Molly’s age, when dips of depression and passive suicidal thoughts and ‘fantasies’ can be normal – and fleeting.
We’ll never know how fleeting Molly’s thoughts were, because something made her act on them before she was given the chance to work through the tangle. That something, her family found out after a year of trying to get Apple to unlock her iPhone and iPod Touch, was the relentless succession of material on self-harm, suicide, depression and anxiety she was able to view online. These included photographs and suggestions too graphic to describe here.
Now whereas many of these images were algorithms, some Molly will have accessed ‘voluntarily’. And it’s true that a wider culture of glorifying mental illness and suicide is also to blame here. After all, we’re living through a curious period when girls choose to wear T-shirts emblazoned with phrases like “F***ed Up” and “I’ve got issues”, one of the most popular teen series online is ’13 Reasons Why’ – and “hot messes” are covetable enough to make Hollywood producers commission not one but two Zelda Fitzgerald biopics at the same time.
But Ian Russell now knows that in the weeks leading up to his daughter’s death, Molly witnessed “many graphic images of self-harm, though not the one headed ‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished I was dead’ Pinterest sent to her email address a month after she killed herself.
So when this father says sites such as Instagram and Pinterest “helped kill his daughter”, he’s not wildly looking around for someone to blame: he’s found those to blame.
And with the help of the UK government and Papyrus – a suicide prevention charity that has now been contacted by 30 families who believe social media was a factor in their children’s suicides – he is valiantly trying to ensure no family has to go through a pain like theirs again.
But companies like these are very good at wringing their hands and doing nothing. They’ll point out, as the Northern European vice president of Facebook (which owns Instagram) did in response to Molly’s death, that alongside the appalling images she viewed, Molly also looked at a greater number of positive posts attempting to help her. Which is a bit like saying that a photograph of a hanged teenager (available to children as young as 13 on Pinterest until recently) can be offset by 20 pictures of kittens. (© Daily Telegraph London)
Source: Read Full Article