Mental health specialists Dr Harry Barry and Dr Ann-Marie Creaven talk to Claire about how social media-induced perfectionism is causing serious mental health issues in adolescent girls.
Social media has facilitated some pretty appalling online behaviour - some of which has spilled over into the real world. As well as potentially affecting elections and fuelling hatred, social media may be the cause of many mental health issues, including what's known as 'socially prescribed perfectionism'.
This type of perfectionism is directly related to social media and online behaviours. Dr Harry Barry, GP and Mental Health specialist and Dr Ann-Marie Creaven from the Dept of Psychology at the University of Limerick joined Claire Byrne to discuss yet another social media-related malaise.
Ann-Marie broke down the three types of perfectionism and where socially prescribed perfectionism fits in:
"We’ll be talking mostly about the third, but the first two are self-oriented and other-oriented perfectionism. So, self-oriented involves being driven to achieve personal standards of perfection and achievement for yourself, while other-oriented perfectionism involves demanding that other people meet particular standards."
Socially prescribed perfectionism, on the other hand, involves people believing that others demand perfection of them. And it’s not just that you think your boss is expecting a perfect piece of work from you, it’s that you, in general, believe that other people expect perfection from you.
Claire sums up the three types of perfectionism nicely:
"So we have: putting pressure on yourself, putting pressure on other people to be perfect, but what we’re focused on today is feeling that you’re under pressure from all of those external forces to be perfect."
Harry has no hesitation in pointing the finger at what he thinks is responsible for the rise of socially prescribed perfectionism:
"It was an inevitable occurrence that the minute we got the smartphone and social media platforms – particularly Instagram with filters and Snapchat with filters – it was inevitable that a particular group of people would be at risk. And that would be adolescent girls."
It’s always been a part of adolescence for girls, Harry says, that they would compare their appearance with others. But pre-social media, their comparison pool was restricted to their peers and what they saw on TV or in magazines.
Now, of course, they can compare themselves with the millions of other teens on social media. And everybody is changing their appearance with filters:
"So that I seem to have this perfect body image or this perfect face and then compare that, you know, false picture with the almost myriads of false images coming at me where other people have been filtering and doing the same thing. And of course, if I’m a social perfectionist, no matter what I do, I’m never going to achieve the demands that I believe that other people are putting on me."
People who believe that others expect them to be perfect will inevitably fail in their own minds to achieve that perfection – especially when measured against an almost infinite number of seemingly-perfect picture – and this perceived failure leads to feelings not just of anxiety but also of shame, Harry says:
"The emotion that’s missed all the time here is shame. So, I’m not only just anxious about, you know, but I’m also very embarrassed or ashamed, do you know what I mean? Cause I feel, you know, I’m just not matching up to what other people think I should be matching up to."
According to Harry, there’s increasing concern in the mental health area about this sort of perfectionism leading to anxiety, eating orders and depression. And he stresses that this social media-induced form of perfectionism is not just a fad – it has very serious consequences:
"The reality is that there’s been an explosion in self-harm among young girls and we actually don’t know the figures. They’re so big that they’re actually beyond our capacity to actually even measure."
Of even greater concern to Harry are the real life dangers that can result from this perfectionism:
"Suddenly, you find yourself moving even from social perfectionism into a very serious world of eating disorders."
Harry believes that we’re sleepwalking into a nightmare when it comes to social media and adolescent girls. And Ann-Marie stresses the importance of the messaging coming from home and how parents can reinforce an adolescent’s sense of self-worth:
"We value you for who you are [...], our love for you is not conditional on achieving a particular grade; we’re not making many, many comments about your appearance or your food intake, for example.
"We’ll talk about healthy eating, but we won’t talk too much about quantity maybe of food. So, our choice of language is important because we might unintentionally give messages that don’t have the right effect."
Towards the end of the discussion, Harry, hopeful that a ban on phones in schools is coming, made a plea to the government to provide a grant to schools so they can install lockers to put students’ phones into for the duration of the school day.
He’s also hopeful that regulation of social media will finally be taken seriously by governments.
If you have been affected by issues raised in this story, please visit: www.rte.ie/helplines.
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