IIt started with a basic “news you can use” feature of National Public Radio. Entitled “5 ways to deal with the stressful news cycle Producer Andee Tagle’s article, published in late February, offered advice on how to deal with anxiety caused by news consumption in times of stress.
Among Tagle’s advice: “Do something that feels good to your body and helps you get out of your head.” Also: “The kitchen is a safe space for many of us. Maybe this is the weekend you finally re-create Grandpa’s famous lasagna…or maybe you just get lost in kitchen organization.”
Tagle’s simple self-help advice quickly went on contempt for social networksseemingly striking a nerve among numerous commenters.
Dan McLaughlin of National Review tweeted that the piece He noted that NPR employees “don’t really see their audience as adults.”
“I’m all for mental health awareness and therapeutic care,” Daily Beast editor Anthony Fisher tweeted.before finally dismissing Tagle’s article as “a lifestyle guide for narcissists.”
The article and its condemnation raise questions related to research on the mental and psychological toll of daily news consumption that has gone unnoticed by the public in recent years. Recent surveys and research on the subject they have only occasionally been publicized in the general press. The global COVID-19 pandemic, and the doomsday news reports it spawned, attracted a little more attention to this investigation.
Yet the mental and psychological toll of news consumption remains largely unknown to the general news consumer. Even if the research isn’t widely known, the emotions felt by a Northwestern University School of Medicine Article called “headline stress disorderthey probably exist for some unknown proportion of news consumers. After all, if these sentiments didn’t exist for at least some of its audience, NPR would never have published that article. Fox News would also not have published a similar article to help their viewers cope.
Also read: Singapore ‘most fatigued’, Mexico and Brazil also don’t sleep much, UK bedmaker study finds
The news threatens mental stability
The idea that more news, delivered faster through new and addictive technologies, can cause psychological and medical harm has a long history in the United States.
Media scholars like Daniel Czitrom and Apply Jeffrey they have noted how contemporary research linked the occurrence and prevalence of neurasthenia to the rapid proliferation of telegraphic news in the late 19th century. neurasthenia is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a condition characterized especially by physical and mental exhaustion, usually accompanied by symptoms (such as headache and irritability)”. Early 19th-century scientific exploration in neurology and psychiatry suggested that excessive news consumption could lead to “nervous exhaustion” and other illnesses.
In my own research on social psychology and radio listening, I noticed that the same medical descriptions were repeated in the 1920s, once the radio became widespread. News reports chronicled how radio news listening and consumption seemed to threaten some people’s mental stability.
A New York Times front page article in 1923 he noticed a woman in Minnesota divorcing her husband on the then-new ground that he was suffering from “radiomania.” The wife felt that her husband “paid more attention to her radio set than to her or her home,” which had apparently “alienated her affections” from her.
Similar reports of addiction, mania, and psychological entanglement spawned by the new media arose again as television proliferated in American homes in the 1950s, and again with the proliferation of the Internet.
Public discussion of the psychological addiction and mental damage caused by new technologies, and the consequent moral panics they engender, appears periodically. as new communication technologies emerge. But, historically, adjustment and integration of new media occurs over time, and disorders such as neurasthenia and “radiomania” are largely forgotten.
Anxious for scary news
“Headline stress disorder” may sound ridiculous to some, but research shows that reading the news can cause certain subsets of news consumers to develop measurable emotional effects.
There they are numerous studies looking inside this phenomenon. In general, they find that some people, under certain conditions, may be vulnerable to diagnosable and potentially harmful levels of anxiety if exposed to certain types of news.
The problem for researchers is isolating the exact subset of news consumers to whom this happens and accurately describing the effect that occurs in response to identified specific news topics and methods of news consumption.
It is not only probable, but even plausible, that many people feel more anxious about the widespread distribution of scary news. And if a news consumer has a diagnosed anxiety disorder, depression, or other identified mental health problem, the probability that obviously distressing news reports would amplify and inflame such underlying problems seem almost certain.
The fact that popular culture manages to pathologize much of everyday behavior does not mean that the problems identified are not real, as critics of the NPR story suggested.
We all eat; but some of us eat too much. When that happens, everyday behavior turns into actions that can threaten health and survival. Similarly, most of us make an effort to stay informed, but it’s likely that in certain situations, for certain people, staying informed when the news is particularly terrifying could threaten their mental health.
Therefore, the question is not whether the problem is real, but how research could quantify and describe its true prevalence and how to address the problem.
And that’s precisely why the NPR article caused such a stir. Many people who consume news without problems cannot understand why others might benefit from learning how to deal with “headline stress disorder.”
In reality, the criticism leveled at NPR says nothing about those who find our current run of bad news particularly anxiety-provoking. It speaks volumes about the lack of empathy from those who would scoff at the idea.
This article has been republished from The conversation. Read the original article here.
Also read: The mental health conversation in India is opening up. Next up is better access to treatment
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