Social Media, Meta, & Self-Injury, with Lotte Rubæk

The Psychology of Self-Injury: Exploring Self-Harm & Mental Health

In this episode, Lotte Rubæk, MSc, who leads the Self-Injury Team in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in the Capital Region of Denmark, talks about why interaction on image-based social media platforms like Instagram can be particularly appealing to young people who self-harm. She discusses the dynamics that can arise between users in the more closed social media networks, and she explains why she so publicly resigned from Meta's global expert panel on self-harm after serving on it for 3.5 years.

Connect with Lotte on LinkedIn here, and read The Guardian's article about her decision to resign from Meta here. Listen to her podcast, Selvskadens Psykologi, which means The Psychology of Self-Injury in Danish, here. Read about the U.S. Surgeon General's May 2023 advisory about the effects social media use has on youth mental health here, and read about his June 2024 call on Congress to require warning labels on social media platforms and their effects on young people’s lives here.

Below are Lotte's two book chapters in the new Oxford Handbook of Nonsuicidal Self-Injury and a few additional papers related to social media and self-injury:

1. Rubæk, L., & Møhl, B. (2023). Direct and indirect self-injury. In E. E. Lloyd-Richardson, I. Baetens, & J. Whitlock (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of nonsuicidal self-injury (pp. 41-71). Oxford University Press.
2. Møhl, B., & Rubæk, L. (2023). Understanding the link between direct and indirect self-injurious behavior. In E. E. Lloyd-Richardson, I. Baetens, & J. Whitlock (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of nonsuicidal self-injury (pp. 680-701). Oxford University Press.
3. Westers, N. J., Lewis, S. P., Whitlock, J., Schatten, H. T., Ammerman, B., Andover, M. S., & Lloyd-Richardson, E. E.(2021). Media guidelines for the responsible reporting and depicting of non-suicidal self-injury. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 219(2), 415-418.
4. Zhu, L., Westers, N. J.,Horton, S. E., King, J. D., Diederich, A., Stewart, S. M., & Kennard, B. D. (2016). Frequency of exposure to and engagement in nonsuicidal self-injury among inpatient adolescents. Archives of Suicide Research, 20(4), 580-590.
5. Bridge, J. A., Greenhouse, J. B., Ruch, D., Stevens, J., Ackerman, J., Sheftall, A. H., Horowitz, L. M., Kelleher, K. J., & Campo, J. V. (2020). Association between the release of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why and suicide rates in the United States: An interrupted time series analysis. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 59(2), 236-243.

Follow Dr. Westers on Instagram and Twitter/X (@DocWesters). To join ISSS, visit itriples.org and follow ISSS on Facebook and Twitter/X (@ITripleS).

The Psychology of Self-Injury podcast has been rated as one of the "10 Best Self Harm Podcasts" and "20 Best Clinical Psychology Podcasts" by Feedspot and one of the Top 100 Psychology Podcasts by Goodpods. It has also been featured in Audible's "Best Mental Health Podcasts to Defy Stigma and Begin to Heal."

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