Mental illness is often, on some level, a problem of bad data and processing issues.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder, for example, begins with a simple processing error. The sufferer experiences anxiety; the disorder exaggerates it—exaggerates it until the source of the anxiety, no matter how abstract or inconsequential, is perceived as an existential threat that supersedes all other concerns. To this end, the disorder prescribes a behavioral regimen to reduce anxiety and compels the sufferer to repeat it over and over, even as habituation dulls the relief it provides.
Slowly, the disorder can contort even the most sensible problem-solving strategies into a self-generating cycle of obsession, a cycle that repeats even after the OCD sufferer realizes this behavior isn’t rational. Most sufferers understand that their bad thoughts are out of control and their rituals aren’t helping, but OCD’s symptoms are so grindingly repetitive, so emotionally exhausting, that conscious resistance often proves insufficient to break their hold.
In the abstract, OCD works a lot like a software glitch. The system accepts a faulty command, gets stuck in a loop, and burns through its processing power until the inevitable crash.
Imagine the consequences, then, when an OCD sufferer is able to access an infinite library of bad data. A tool you use every day to compose your thoughts and communicate with friends and loved ones, even as it pesters you with unwanted suggestions and notifications. A system designed to mislead its users into self-perpetuating patterns of addictive engagement. An interface that juxtaposes your personal thoughts with the confident nonsense of the uninformed, the anonymized cruelty of strangers, and the targeted provocations of attention-seeking advertisers. A device that, by accident or design, systematically undermines your ability to distinguish good data from bad.
The internet is uniquely dangerous as a source of misinformation on the subject of mental illness. As long as the internet has existed, it’s been common practice to take anything you read online with a grain of salt. But common sense and a bit of healthy skepticism are no longer enough to ensure safe navigation of the internet. Because companies realize they need to keep users on their platforms to make money, the web has evolved to incentivize the publication of misinformation, as long as it prolongs user engagement. In the most odious example, we’ve seen Facebook algorithmically recommend content related to eating disorders to vulnerable young people because triggering your users’ self-harm behaviors is an incredibly effective way to keep them invested in content and clicking on ads.
But big tech and their exploitative platforms aren’t the only sources of mental health misinformation: Interacting with other sufferers online, even when all parties involved have the best of intentions, can be just as dangerous. Discussion forums run without therapeutic supervision can distribute misinformation on mental illness with the efficiency of a viral superspreader event.
If you struggle with OCD, for example, an unsupervised online support group—while earnestly trying to provide comfort and solidarity—might end up introducing you to novel triggers for new obsessive thoughts, or encouraging your maladaptive coping behaviors. Online relationships built around shared mental health problems can quickly become toxically codependent. In real life, OCD is slightly disincentivized by social pushback by people around you, but online you’ll find countless well-meaning strangers ready to indulge your neuroses on demand. It’s just so easy and gratifying to build a “safe space” online—without realizing that the false comfort it provides is suffocating you.
That all of this content coexists on the same screen, I think, poses a historically unprecedented threat to our collective mental health. I’m reminded of the words of the futurologist Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.” McLuhan was saying that the medium we use to access information changes how we engage with it; in the parlance of our times, the context is part of the content. Consider how readers responded to H.G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds as a speculative fantasy, and how Orson Welles’s infamous radio adaptation of the same story drove listeners to panic at the threat of a Martian invasion.
With the internet, we have embraced a technology that does not distinguish between cognition, conversation, and consumption. And if we apply McLuhan’s logic to the problem of mental health misinformation, the unique hazard posed by the ubiquitous touchscreen—where personal thoughts and private conversations exist on the same physical screen as messages from strangers and corporations, ranging from the credible to the erroneous to actively predatory—is obvious. When two messages appear side-by-side, we implicitly associate them, not just spatially but qualitatively. Each text lends credence to its twin. The boundary between the internal and external is made permeable. Mental illness, like a conventional disease, has established a new vector for infection, and it is thriving.
I am not an expert, but purely as an observer, I would argue that the trajectory of the internet—from a novel universal publishing platform to a virtual auction block where corporations bid to monopolize and monetize your attention—will inevitably culminate in something malignantly useless. If we cannot reverse this trajectory, then perhaps the best outcome will be for the internet to be so crippled by its failures that it will cease to function. Maybe one day—like three-ring circuses and the home shopping network—the web’s inability to provide value will become so egregious, and its pool of vulnerable users so limited, that it will cease to be profitable, and these systems of exploitation will simply evaporate.
I just wouldn’t hold my breath.
I hope the future of the internet is more conducive to sanity, on both individual and societal levels. Until that day, we must recognize the internet for what it has become: a medium for the viral corruption of information. An ever-ripening cesspool of malign ideas. A medium ruled by bad data. Please, exercise appropriate caution.
Copyright Fletcher Wortmann 2024