Flossie Clegg – a 21-year-old fashion, beauty and lifestyle content creator – never consciously chose to let her followers know she was struggling. “It was something I just couldn’t really hide anymore,” she recalls. “I was posting so erratically, and my vibe was super off across my content.” She eventually felt it would be easier to tell her followers what had been going on, rather than to “disappear and have people speculate”. Doing so, she says, “would’ve felt hard to deal with”.
Four years ago Flossie posted a video to YouTube – where she has over 687,000 subscribers – about dealing with polycystic ovary syndrome, dropping out of school and hair loss.. “I got such an overwhelming response filled with so much love, support and positivity that I had the confidence to talk a little bit more about it where I felt I could help people,” she says. Flossie’s more recent videos – such as “Sad Girl Anxious Evening Routine” and “an honest week in my life” – are similarly open about mental health.
But being so candid also has its downsides, opening the door to further judgement and speculation. “Often I’ve had people ‘diagnosing’ me with certain conditions, demanding I talk about topics I find uncomfortable, or saying I don’t deserve to feel the way I do because of my job and lifestyle.” At times, it’s made her hold back on speaking about what she is going through.
Flossie isn’t the only influencer who has had her mental health pored over online. Internet speculation runs wild over which wellness bloggers have eating disorders, or whether a certain influencer might be depressed or having a mental breakdown. Of course, it’s not just influencers, but also celebrities, who are subject to this. In January, Britney Spears was forced to issue a statement after her fans called 911, sending police officers to her house because they were concerned about mental wellbeing. “I love and adore my fans,” Britney wrote, “but this time things went a little too far.”
In the past, speculating about the mental health of public figures has been subject to regulation. In 1964, an article was published in which psychiatrists were polled over whether US Senator Barry Goldwater was fit to be president. After the politician sued the magazine’s editor and won damages, the American Psychiatric Association’s Principles of Medical Ethics introduced a rule forbidding psychiatrists from giving their professional opinion about public figures whom they have not examined in person.
But on social media, there is no Goldwater Rule to prevent armchair psychologists from weighing in on strangers’ mental state. Arguably, today’s influencers are more likely to face this kind of scrutiny than the public figures of the past’; in offering their followers glimpses of their everyday lives, it fosters the sense that we know them intimately. This can make us feel entitled to know every aspect of their lives – not just the public persona, but the more vulnerable, or authentic, version of themselves, too.
It’s something Flossie has experienced firsthand. “There are of course negatives with being open about struggling with mental health – one of which being the entitlement of some viewers,” she says. It also means people coming to her with their own struggles.
“The point at which [concern] crosses over into plain gossiping is often blurred.”
Elevating influencers to the role of mental health experts just by merit of them speaking out about their own struggles is a common occurrence. It’s also unsurprising, given the financial barriers preventing people from accessing professional help. “I’ve never claimed to be a therapist or a professional and have always encouraged people to talk to a professional if they are experiencing dangerous thoughts,” says Flossie. “It’s made me feel so guilty in the past.”
Because of the parasocial relationship that social media facilitates, it’s understandable that people would feel genuine concern for strangers’ wellbeing, and want to share that with others. But the point at which this crosses over to plain gossiping is often blurred. Tabloids once sated the urge to speculate about celebrities’ lives, and did so in a way that was unashamedly cruel (take, for example, the coverage of Britney Spears’ 2007 “meltdown”). Now, with social media, this gossiping often takes on a moralising tone – whether it’s by imploring people to “seek help” or to “open up” about their struggles.
But while the language may have changed, the same shaming impulse is often still present online. “I don’t think we’re seeing the same level of stigmatising and cruelty as before,” says Lucy Foulkes, an academic psychologist and author of What Mental Health Really Is – and What It Isn’t. “But I don’t know if we’ve managed to move away from the idea of [mental health] being a spectacle.”
There is another factor which might be motivating people to dissect the mental healthiness of perfect strangers online. “Research has shown that people use social media content to understand themselves better,” says Sharon Coen, a senior lecturer in Media Psychology. “So, it could be that by discussing the mental health of somebody else, they’re trying to understand their own.” But this is a “risky” approach, Sharon says. Given that what we see on social media are curated snippets of someone’s life, it’s not necessarily the kind of place we want to derive any conclusions about ourselves from. Equally, it’s not necessarily a place to make useful judgements about anyone else either. As Sharon notes, “Even [when someone is posting] about mental health, it’s crafted and constructed in a way that attracts more attention.”
Another problem with throwing around diagnoses online is how it dilutes the meaning of medicalised terms. “Whenever ourselves personally, or someone in our lives, or a public figure, seem to be having some sort of difficulty – or deviating from whatever is considered ‘normal’ – our compulsion is that it must be a sort of psychiatric difficulty,” Lucy says. “When we overuse these terms, someone might think, ‘Oh it’s not that bad, because that’s a very high-functioning celebrity [who has this issue]’… it then loses currency for the people who really need those terms.”
Speculating about anyone’s mental health, or labelling people’s ‘condition’ without their consent or the qualifications to do so, often ends up perpetuating stigma. And crucially, the fictional reality of social media can’t give us the answers we need to make a fair judgement.