Internet Personality Disorder

How social media is ruining another generation of girls.

Girls in their preteen/early teenage years are impressionable. This is not a controversial statement. Before young women can become free, independent thinkers with their own distinct interests and personalities, they go through a phase where they are malleable, forever altering their own image to fit the same mold as their friends and the people they idolize. It’s a vital developmental step, especially for women. First we learn to behave socially, picking up the subtle and valuable clues on what is acceptable and what isn’t. Then, after we have learned how to be social beings, how to ‘fit in’ with the people around us, we learn how to function in society as individuals. First we conform, then we stand out.

This works for the majority of girls. Those who ‘fit in’ with their peers socially have no difficulty conforming to the people around them. In fact, they revel in it. There are still problems, of course. Teen/preteen girls are notoriously catty. They talk about their friends behind their back, spread rumors, end friendships. This is all part of ordinary development. They learn how to make new friends, keep old ones, and navigate this hostile social climate.

The real problem comes when a girl is rejected by her peers altogether. These lonely girls are vulnerable—they are desperately seeking some group to assimilate with, but they cannot find one. Already struggling socially (having for whatever reason not learned how to socialize ‘properly’ or, in her unsophisticated mind, learned how to separate her private self from her social self) this type of girl turns to the internet, which provides her with a false social outlet that mimics the desired one that she cannot find in her real-life peers.

Thus, these girls latch onto fake personas, finely crafted by algorithms that reward obsessive, addictive behavior. Remember, girls at this age group have brains that are not fully developed yet. The ‘critical thinking’ centers that aid adult judgment are vastly underdeveloped. They simply do not have the capacity to judge what they are looking at with a critical eye. Some of these girls are very smart—this only allows them to absorb this harmful information faster. They latch onto this online caricature of reality, start emulating the behaviors that they see there. The exact ‘trend’ hardly matters.

The first generation of the internet had two ideologically separate yet often overlapping themes. There was the ‘goth’/‘emo’ craze, where social media sites like Tumblr were flooded with images of girls in all-black with their eyes covered by exaggerated side-bangs, and, often, posts promoting suicidal ideation and self-harm. This coexisted (and often overlapped with) with the eating disorder pages (dubbed ‘pro-ana’ and ‘pro-mia,’ meaning anorexia and bulimia). It would not be uncommon to find, for example, black-and-white photos of alarmingly skinny thighs with the word “FAT” carved into them in blood.

Imagine the effect that this has on a young teen/preteen girl. Their bodies are changing. They’re going through puberty—the ‘female’ hormones that they’re feeling for the first time are something they’ve never felt before, and it’s confusing them. All of a sudden the inviting little friendly pond of elementary school has turned into a shark pit. It’s an awkward time in their lives. They’re ugly—probably the ugliest they’ve ever been (or will be) in their lives—and, having just recently been introduced to the concept of sex, they’re highly fixated on the idea that they should be beautiful. And on top of it all they’re on the internet, looking at images of unhealthy women and thinking they have to meet this standard, which can only be achieved by harming themselves.

Their social development only gets worse. Still not really knowing how to interact with their peers (the problem which got them into this mess in the first place), they default to ready-made responses that they learned on the internet, which outs them as an ‘internet person’ immediately. Speaking predominantly in (for lack of a better word) cringeworthy catchphrases does not exactly make people like you. Furthermore, if they go a step further and engage in the risky behaviors that their online community is promoting, it ruins their chance at ‘normal’ development, because healthy, non-confused girls will want to stay away from them.

Today the platforms and the trends have changed. TikTok is the dominant medium. Goths and emos are on the decline, and posts promoting self-harm and eating disorders have been replaced by ‘quirky’ nihilism and gender ideology. Instead of wanting to be pretty and thin, young girls are rejecting the idea of femininity altogether, and striving for an even greater impossibility: being the opposite sex. Perhaps their rejection by their peers is cited as proof of their transgenderism. In addition to the diagnoses of anxiety and depression, they latch onto another one: gender dysphoria.

Despite their difference in appearance, the character of these subcultures has stayed eerily the same. They fulfill the same need within the child. They provide a ready-made personality for girls who are struggling to figure theirs out, and they provide a twisted means of escapism for girls who cannot handle the grief that is caused by their awkward, tumultuous, and unattractive transition from childhood to adulthood.

It’s no accident that the goths and emos of yesterday and the transgenders of today are all fixated on identity. It’s the very thing that’s in flux at that stage of life. This is the age where girls’ identities change. They aren’t children anymore, and for the first time in the world, they’re learning who they actually are. This is not a seamless transition for many people.

They also resemble one another in the way they urge young girls to change their body. Whether it’s by starving themselves or by seeking medical treatment that makes them look more like men than women, the result is the same: harmful, dangerous measures taken in pursuit of an impossible standard.

It’s also interesting to note how much of these subcultures have their roots in their adherents’ choice of clothing. It is remarkable how large an effect something so innocuous can have. The preteen years are the first time in many girls’ lives where they actually pay attention to the clothes they wear. If they struggle with this, their subculture of choice offers a way out. Just wear lots of black, if you’re goth or emo. Transgenderism addresses this even more effectively: “Are you a girl who doesn’t like girly clothes? That sounds hard. Notice how boys don’t pay attention to their clothes at all. You must be a boy—that’s why you’re having so much trouble with this.” It provides a solution! And in the short-term, the shallow remediation of the girl’s problem and the (often disingenuous) praise she receives affirms the idea that she is doing the right thing.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of these movements is the medicalization of their (usually entirely normal) feelings. Despite all the changes internet subcultures have undergone, there is one mainstay that does not seem to be going anywhere: depression. It seems every girl on the internet has self-diagnosed herself with depression, and these subcultures promote the idea of getting your mother to take you to the doctor and get an official diagnosis.

These girls want to be ill. It provides an ‘external locus of control,’ a way to explain away their bad feelings as a case of victimhood, rather than personal failure. Being rejected by your peers is painful. It is easier for a girl to explain this away as an unfortunate case of mental illness than to accept that the reason why their peers don’t like them lies with them and them alone. A diagnosis of gender dysphoria fulfills this same need.

The tragic thing is that it’s impossible for girls this age to understand that it’s okay that their peers don’t like them. Most of the time, it’s simply due to the fact that a girl has interests that are different from her peers. And the differences that are such a hindrance to them at twelve, thirteen, or fourteen might end up becoming a major asset to them later in life, if they can manage to get through it without further isolating themselves.

It’s not so simple, of course. These drastic risk-taking behaviors are often the result of bullying. Often times, this rejection and torment causes a reaction in girls that causes them to present with all of the symptoms of anxiety and depression. They do not ‘have’ anxiety or depression, though. They are not exhibiting symptoms of a mental illness. They are reacting in an appropriate way to a very real thing that is happening to them, that they’re often so secretive about it their parents and mental health providers don’t know anything about it.

Think about how powerful this is. Social contagion has the power to convince intelligent young women to voluntarily slash their own wrists or cut off their own healthy breasts, just to feel less alone. It’s a lie as nefarious as any drug addiction. Afterwards, they’re more alone than they ever were, with scars that will be with them forever, even when they (hopefully) grow into healthy women and look back with horror at how messed up they once were.

Of course, this may not happen for the majority of people. I’m sure many ‘emos’ of yesterday are now long-term customers of the pharmaceutical industry, hooked on antidepressants that have completely changed their personality, with a void in the core of their hearts that has been there since childhood because they’ve never done the hard work of reckoning with the question of their own identity. And we have no idea how messed up future victims of gender ideology will be, especially if they have gone the next step and hormonally altered the development of their bodies and brains.

This provides an interesting question. If mental health counseling is an industry that is run by pharmaceutical companies, is there any incentive to dissuade these children from these harmful ideologies? If you were a psychopath who stood to make billions off of antidepressants, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, would you want to help these girls, or would you urge them to fall deeper within their ideological pits? Every girl sacrificed to this mess is another customer.

This is the part where I feel as though I should offer up a solution. I don’t have one. Getting rid of monetary incentives to prey on these girls would certainly help, but only to a point. Pharmaceutical companies did not create this problem; they’re merely cashing in on it.  It’s impossible to keep kids off of the internet (and doing so would only exacerbate the problem of their alienation from their peers). We’d have to revamp the school systems, solve the seemingly unsolvable problem of bullying, and even then, there would still be girls who simply don’t fit in.

Even still, it would go a long way for the mental health profession to refrain from diagnosing these young women of anxiety, depression, and gender dysphoria, and instead to identify their behavior appropriately. It is not a mental health condition, but an entirely solvable byproduct of their withdrawal from ‘normal’ society and retreat into the dark, twisted society of the internet. Perhaps, if they must give it a name (which they often must for insurance purposes), they can call it what it is: ‘internet personality disorder.’