One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 

As we near the one-year anniversary of this God-forsaken quarantine, it is useful (and entertaining) to reflect on the world and how it has changed during this pandemic. Splashed across headlines, felt in campus Zeitgeists, one such change is the emerging mental health crisis. Curfews, stores closing, kicking with your friends becoming a matter of life and death—it would seem that teenagers don’t respond well to being grounded by the state. Trapped indoors, bored and anxious, students are finding other things to fill their time. Think for a moment what you, dear reader, have been doing with your time. Reading, biking, enjoying time with family? Hilarious… more realistically, we’re all just posting memes and laughing at things that really ought not to be laughed at. Oh, and feeling constant, crushing existential dread as thousands die and millions more lose their jobs. Although I like to pretend otherwise, my phone’s “weekly report” kindly reminds me of my increased unhealthy social media habits, a grim reminder of what better uses of my time COVID has stripped from me. 

Doomscrolling Twitter at 3AM with my yellow-tinted screen illuminating my face, I recognize the trend. Tweet after tweet of awful stories regarding disorders and neuroses. Social media has provided the ultimate dumping ground of trauma. Exposing the aforementioned crisis by continuously pushing the horizon between real and digital social media has effectively guaranteed that a crisis will emerge. Horizons. Lines in space where sky meets Earth in an infinite expanse. What makes horizons what they are is one immutable fact: their unattainability. Every time we near the horizon it recedes away, no matter how far or for how long we travel. So it goes with online communities: The closer we get to the horizon between real life and digital ones, the further back it is pushed. Real life becomes more and more digitized. 

What started in 2006 as an innocuous platform to send out thoughts to the internet has evolved into a major media community. How does this relate to mental health? Well, the more people get connected, the tighter their virtual communities become. Real friend groups become indistinguishable from digital cliques. Combine this tightness with the free flow of thought to screen and people are now venting anything to everyone. That is where all the doom and gloom come from during my 3AM thumb workout. Add in the fact that everyone from the most powerful politicians in our country to isolated schmucks living in their parents’ basements can plug into this online stage, and the bigger problem emerges. Everyone can vent their trauma, creating a tidal wave of negativity.

Because of the free access to Twitter and the like, the platforms accumulate many, many users. Of course, this is already known. What is often overlooked, or rather optimistically ignored, is that people get so swept up in the excitement of making it big that they will bend the truth to gain followers. Not all trauma you see online is real! People invent fake trauma to create real drama, producing spectacle and gaining a following of like-minded “neurotics”. Unfortunately, determining what is real and what is not is part of the very same horizon mentioned previously; reality is pushed back and made a tiny speck in the distance, therefore making the distinction between it and digital fantasy harder than ever. In addition to people flexing their trauma are people declaring themselves experts in these neuroses, hashing out prognoses on the feed to anyone unfortunate enough to ask (or not ask, it doesn’t matter for some of these people). Now any distinction is gone, lost between the milieu of fake trauma/real drama and a squalor of diagnoses and recommendations. 

One may ask: what’s the harm? After all, real or not, people are just having fun or, better yet, connecting with a community they trust who can help them through their issues. Beyond the obvious moral gripes with faking an illness, there is the problem that unqualified people are now being trusted with medical advice based on their follower count or social clout. Blue checkmarks become de jure psychiatrists and the Twitter Behavioral Health Pavilion opens for business. Take AOC. After the Capitol incursion (Raid? Coup? Revolt?) she took to Instagram live to recall the events of that day and share past trauma. Her comments almost immediately became inundated with countless “experts” diagnosing her with such-&-such or so-&-so, getting heated over what does and does not count as actual disorders. What’s next? Twitter itself becomes the sole proprietor of mental health, diagnosing you and prescribing Zoloft? “Our services noticed you’ve only tweeted 50 times today, 38% less than usual. Are you ok? We here at Twitter care deeply about our users, so we’ve automatically referred you to one of our mental health professionals.” 

Going back to the beginning, the COVID mental health crisis seems less like a crisis and more like a symptom of a much larger disease, a disease of horizons. Flooded with trauma (real or fake) and crosstalk of diagnoses, the number of people suffering balloons. Because of quarantine, more people than ever are active on Twitter, exacerbating the issue. This crowding only serves to make it harder for people who actually need help to receive it. Or maybe I’m just not hip enough and overthinking the whole thing. Who knows? Just think twice before flexing your neurodivergence on the timeline.

Evan Trabitz ‘23 studies in the School of Engineering & Applied Science. He can be reached at evan.trabitz@wustl.edu.