Selfitis: An obsessive compulsive disorder of taking too many selfies

June 29, 2015

By NewsGram Staff Writer

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has officially deemed taking selfies as a “mental disorder”.

The APA made this classification during its annual board of directors meeting in Chicago recently. Giving the name “selfitis” to the disorder, the APA defined the disorder as a type of an obsessive compulsive disorder to take one’s own pictures and post them on social media. They also stated that this condition is a mechanism used by people to make up for their low self esteem and increase intimacy with other people.

According to the APA, there are three levels of selfitis,

Borderline Selfitis: Taking selfies at least three times a day, but not posting them on the social media.
Acute Selfitis: Taking selfies at least three times a day, and sharing them all on social media.
Chronic Selfitis: It is defined as an uncontrollable urge to take one’s own pictures round the clock and posting them on social media platforms more than six times a day.

Recently, the term “Selfitis” also made it into the Oxford Dictionary of English according to a website.

Makati City, a city in Philippines was named the “selfie capital of the world” by Time magazine recently. This news of selfies being looked at as a mental disorder, might make things dismal for this Filipino city.

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Women Perceive Edited Selfies on Instagram as Less Authentic, says Study

The results showed that the more participants perceived that the photos were edited, the less they internalised the thin ideal

NewsGram Desk

October 1, 2018

Women may perceive selfies on Instagram and other social media sites as less authentic if they know it has been edited, a new study suggests.

The findings, published in the journal Body Image, suggest that when women believed that selfies of thin and sexualised women had been edited, viewing these images had less negative impact on their mental health.

“Women see the edited photos as less authentic and it reduces the negative effect these images can have on them. They know that the online images might not reflect an offline reality,” said lead author Megan Vendemia from The Ohio State University in the US.

According to the researcher, many studies have found that viewing thin and sexualised images of models or others can lead women to put more value on being slender themselves — a line of thinking called thin ideal internalisation.

This internalisation can in turn lead to eating disorders or other psychological problems. But the findings suggested that women were less likely to internalise the thin ideal if they believed the pictures they viewed were edited.

For the study, the research team involved 360 female college students who were told that the study was designed to determine how people evaluate images that appear on popular social media sites.

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The team viewed 45 selfies, taken from public Instagram accounts of thin women in revealing clothing. Some of the photos had icons, placed by the researchers, that indicated the image was edited in Photoshop or included an Instagram filter.

The results showed that the more participants perceived that the photos were edited, the less they internalised the thin ideal. (IANS)