Shanahan, N, Brennan, C orcid.org/0000-0002-5258-8497 and House, A orcid.org/0000-0001-8721-8026 (2019) Self-harm and social media: thematic analysis of images posted on three social media sites. BMJ Open, 9 (2). e027006. ISSN 2044-6055
Abstract
Objectives: To explore the nature of images tagged as self-harm on popular social media sites and what this might tell us about how these sites are used.
Design: A visual content and thematic analysis of a sample of 602 images captured from Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.
Results: Over half the images tagged as self-harm had no explicit representation of self-harm. Where there was explicit representation, self-injury was the most common; none of these portrayed images of graphic or shocking self-injury. None of the images we captured specifically encouraged self-harm or suicide and there was no image that could be construed as sensationalising self-harm.
Four themes were found across the images: communicating distress, addiction and recovery, gender and the female body, identity and belonging.
Conclusions: Findings suggest that clinicians should not be overly anxious about what is being posted on social media. Although we found a very few posts suggesting self-injury was attractive, there were no posts that could be viewed as actively encouraging others to self-harm. Rather, the sites were being used to express difficult emotions in a variety of creative ways, offering inspiration to others through the form of texts or shared messages about recovery.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2019. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. |
Keywords: | Self-harm; Social media; inages |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > School of Medicine (Leeds) > Leeds Institute of Health Sciences (Leeds) > Academic Unit of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 17 Jan 2019 15:30 |
Last Modified: | 14 Feb 2019 13:52 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | BMJ Journals |
Identification Number: | 10.1136/bmjopen-2018-027006 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:141125 |