n of 2, this has been my experience as well. I was almost killed in a shooting in 2021, and in 2022 I started seeing a therapist. Going into therapy made me relate to my trauma more, think about my trauma more often, and self identify as a "traumatized individual". I don't think any of that helped. The only thing that really helped was daily meditation/mindfulness, which does the opposite - it teaches you that the thoughts and experiences you have are fleeting and rather than hold on to them you can let them go.
That being said, I don't think this is a strong enough phenomenon that it explains the rather large trends upwards in self harm/mental health. I think a good control is the graph that shows Schizophrenia - a 67% uptick shows that the diagnosis rates are probably a lot higher than the early 2000s, since I doubt that schizophrenia is really becoming more common due to social media.
Relating this back to social media, I've noticed that at times younger people almost exert a social pressure to link all behavior to anything remotely traumatic. I've had some shitty stuff happen to me, life has had it's rough points, but I've always felt pretty lucky overall. I've noticed in arguments with roommates/friends/etc who are younger by a few years, there is significantly more forgiveness towards anything that can even be tangentially linked to something that can be identified as a trauma. I noticed it because over time it led me to start slowly reframing experiences and actually focusing more on the damage they'd done. And its funny, the most traumatizing experience of my life has probably been the push to open up and focus on my traumas. My mental health has improved a lot since distancing myself from people who are too eager to focus on trauma. I wonder how that plays into the whole social mental health conversation. Like when does starting a conversation and destigmatizing a topic turn into feeding it and enabling it? Not to say by any means mental health was handled well before, but I think we might have made something of a deal with the devil in how we frame mental health on social media.
I have a lot of thoughts on this as well and I'm not sure. I definitely felt like my mental health got worse when I started therapy, but was it because my mental health was already doing worse?
The times in my life when I've been the most anxious or unwell have been when I'm questioning my mental health. And I think that the society we live in does encourage people to open up more. But if you have ADHD / obsessive compulsive tendencies, and your brain works like mine, that opening up can just look like obsessing over why you aren't feeling 100%. Then it's a self fulfilling prophecy.
That being said, I don't think this is a strong enough phenomenon that it explains the rather large trends upwards in self harm/mental health. I think a good control is the graph that shows Schizophrenia - a 67% uptick shows that the diagnosis rates are probably a lot higher than the early 2000s, since I doubt that schizophrenia is really becoming more common due to social media.