Social Media Contagion, Digital Self-Diagnosis and Youth Mental Health

Abstract

In Australia and elsewhere, popular critics, moral entrepreneurs and psy-professionals continue to champion ever-evolving concerns about social media or digital technology provoking and spreading psychopathology in young people. What continues to garner attention is the presumed potential that social media participation—especially when pseudonymous, unsurveilled and ‘uncontained’—risks social contagion: the spontaneous spread of ideas or feelings through collective engagement online. Young people are positioned as highly suggestible to self-diagnosis and psychopathologisation via digital media content and participation. Yet, I argue, the concept and metaphor of contagion is unhelpful for und..