Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a mental disorder in which someone experiences intense, disturbing thoughts or feelings for long durations of time after being in a traumatic event. As noted in a study, exposure to traditional media coverage (including television or radio) of such events has also been associated with a higher burden of mental disorders. The problem here is that people get too involved in the negativity around them, spending hours on news that is neither good for their mental health in the short or even in the longer run.
As stated by Dr. Supreet Khare from California Medical Behavioral Health, “Being exposed to other people’s sufferings can take a negative toll on people, and this has mainly been noted among people who are professionally linked to trauma such as healthcare workers. And with social media enabling graphic images and news to circulate with horrifying details, it is natural to feel the pain and anguish of the ones going through it.”
In a study conducted in 2015, 189 participants were used, with a mean age of 37 and an almost equal gender split, for a clinical assessment for PTSD. This assessment included a personality questionnaire, a vicarious trauma assessment, and a questionnaire about many violent news or events on social media or the internet. The results of this study indicated that 22 percent of these 189 (~42 individuals) scored high on clinical measures for PTSD, even though none of them were present in person and only witnessed them through broadcast. The ones who saw these events in real life were the most affected.
Dr. Yashwant Chaudhri said, “It is quite worrying that people don’t understand the risks social media brings with its increased access and availability via smartphones and tablets. The most susceptible ones are the people with outgoing personalities.” To cement his thoughts, he even presented us with an example of a recent study that concluded that people exposed to COVID-19 related information frequently had higher odds of anxiety than those who were not exposed to COVID-19 relation information on news or social media.