Digital Media, Suicide, and Self-Injury

Abstract

While interest in the relationship between media use and young people's mental health is not new, the complexity of newer media technologies present novel research challengeslargely due to the interactive, multidimensional nature of contemporary communication technologies, such as those typified by social media environments. While early media studies focused primarily on effects of "screen time," studies of modern-day social media must grapple with a number of overlapping and influential factors since effects are no longer related to mere exposure to potentially harmful content, but to the interactions that take place as individuals use and shape these platforms, as well.The relationship between social media and self-injurious behaviorsspecifically suicidal thoughts and behaviors and nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI)emerged as a primary research focus soon after social media came into widespread use, perhaps due to the well-established links between both media exposure and well-being (Wartella & Reeves, 1985) and to media effects and suicidal thoughts and behaviors (Phillips, 1974). This focus was reinforced by studies linking widely covered suicides (Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2012) and popular shows depicting suicide (Swedo et al., 2020) to upticks in self-injury and suicide-related activity.This chapter is devoted to examining the relationship between social media and self-injurious thoughts and behaviors. Self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITB) describe thoughts and behaviors with (e.g., suicidal ideation, suicide plans, gestures, and behaviors) and without (e.g., NSSI) suicidal intent (Miller & Prinstein, 2019). While the developmental trajectories of NSSI and suicidal thoughts and behaviors differ from one another (Fox et al., 2015), SITB are not always clearly delineated from one another in the literature, in part because they commonly co-occur and in part because they each contribute to an increased risk for future suicide attempts (Kiekens et al., 2018). Such conflation applies to the literature on which this chapter draws. For simplicity, we will use the term SITB to refer to self-injury with, and without, intent in this chapter and we will refer to more specific constructs within this broader term when studies focus on a narrower sample.