Taking Too Many Selfies? Don’t Worry, It’s Not a Disorder READ THIS FOR SELFIE FAKE NEWS A news article was recently published that described how the American Psychiatric Association had classified taking too many selfies as a new mental disorder. The only problem? It wasn’t true. Showing that far too many people don’t ever bother to check to see what kind of website they’re on, thousands of people tweeted and posted links to the fake news article. Nobody stopped for a minute to ask, “Hey, is this true? How come no other news website is reporting it? Don’t worry — taking too many selfies isn’t a mental disorder. Selfies are photographs a person takes of oneself, usually with one’s mobile phone. They’ve become all the rage since the advent of smartphones which often have a camera facing the user. This makes taking a self-portrait in-the-moment easy to do. The fake news article was published to a parody news website ala “The Onion” based in the Philippines called the Adobo Chronicles at the end of March 2014. It began: fAKE NEWS: (The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has officially confirmed what many people thought all along: taking ‘selfies’ is a mental disorder. The APA made this classification during its annual board of directors meeting in Chicago. The disorder is called selfitis, and is defined as the obsessive compulsive desire to take photos of one’s self and post them on social media as a way to make up for the lack of self-esteem and to fill a gap in intimacy.) Thousands of people read the article, didn’t bother to understand they were reading a parody site, and then tweeted (or retweeted) and posted the link to their Facebook page. The social media mania effect then ensued. Very few of those people ever got the update or news that the article — and its claim about selfies — was fake. As regular readers of our site know, the American Psychiatric Association only updates its list of official diagnoses — in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) — once every decade or two. It’s a lengthy process and certainly isn’t something decided at a “board of directors meeting.” aRE YOU AGREED NOW ? Èm Sam psychcentral/blog/archives/2014/05/28/taking-too-many-selfies-dont-worry-its-not-a-disorder/
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 07:27:59 +0000
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