Sorry for trauma dumping
The mental health conversation on social media is backfiring.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.🧩
Are you in the right headspace to receive a newsletter that could possibly hurt you? —Kate
Yesterday, I was chatting with Casey Lewis of After School (that conversation coming soon!), and she mentioned one thing that made Gen Z different from other generations was how they approached health. She cited studies, one of which I read here, that found that Gen Z was much more likely to turn to social media for health information than doctors or even credible health websites.
You may have noticed this yourself on TikTok. Over the past year or so, TikTok users have been self-diagnosing themselves with everything from ADHD to Dissociative Identity Disorder. I’ve opted not to cover it much, because I think questioning the validity of someone’s mental health status does more harm than good in a world where mental health issues still aren’t taken entirely seriously. But it’s definitely A Thing that someone with more qualifications than me should explore.
I don’t think this is something that Gen Z just woke up one day and decided to do. The same way that many of the social media companies that define millennials were often created or are controlled by Gen Xers or millennials, generations that come before set the stage for generations that comes after. If Gen Z are more likely to get their health news from social media, that’s because millennials made social media a place where they could.
When I was a teen on social media, talking about your anxiety was the hot new thing, and I don’t mean that dismissively. It was how I realized that I identified with a lot of the anxiety symptoms creators on YouTube and Tumblr were talking about. I was later diagnosed with anxiety, and given medication that I have now been on for almost 10 years. I don’t know if I would have known that the feelings I was experiencing were abnormal were it not for social media.
The mental health conversation on social media grew from there. Celebrities made headlines for talking about their own struggles with mental health and body image. Trigger warnings were introduced, and are now widely expected when talking about sensitive topics. This is all good, but that doesn’t mean a majority of non-doctors dictating the social norms around mental health doesn’t have its downsides.
Starting in around 2019, awareness of how your mental health needs may be affecting others emerged in two widely-mocked viral tweets: Are You In The Right Headspace To Receive Information That Could Possibly Hurt You? and I’m Actually At My Emotional Capacity Right Now. Both were offered as templates to make sure you weren’t demanding too much emotional labor (another internet buzzword) from your friends. You can pretty much draw a straight line from that to the newest internet term making people feel annoying for having mental health issues: trauma dumping.
Trauma dumping is when, say, you’re at a party of acquaintances and you pour your “traumatic thoughts, feelings, energy onto an unsuspecting person” when they merely ask you how your day is going, per USA Today. But the internet has taken “trauma dumping” and run with it, to the point where a self-proclaimed therapist made a TikTok about patients who “trauma dump” on her. If you can’t trauma dump in therapy, then what can you do there?
While all these viral moments were widely mocked, that doesn’t mean their initial messages haven’t worked their way into my subconscious. I’ve frequently apologized to my therapist for “talking so much.” And earlier this week, I was getting dinner with a friend, and we both mentioned that there were times we felt we couldn’t talk about our emotional issues because we were worried that we would be burdening each other.
This is a bind that’s contrary to what talking about mental health on social media was meant to achieve. You’re already, say, sad, then you feel bad talking to people about how you’re sad, and then the fact that you don’t have anyone to talk to about being sad makes you … even sadder.
I don’t want to commit the very sin I’m criticizing by ending this with any kind of definitive solution to how you should be talking about mental health online—my degree is in English and my brain is just as broken as the next person. But as a friend, there is nothing more flabbergasting than someone you care about saying they worry that it’s asking too much to request basic support—until you realize you could voice the same worry to them. Talk to your friends. And Gen Z, please talk to a doctor, too.