There’s no shortage of bad news in the media to “doomscroll,” from a global pandemic to the war in Ukraine and an impending climate crisis, but new research suggests the compulsive urge to surf the Web can lead to poor mental and physical health outcomes.
Doomscrolling is the tendency to “continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening or depressing,” a practice researchers found has boomed since the onset of the COVID pandemic.
The study, published in the journal Health Communication, found 16.5 percent of about 1,100 people surveyed showed signs of “severely problematic” news consumption, leading to greater levels stress, anxiety and poor health.
Photo: AFP
Associate professor Bryan McLaughlin, the study’s lead author and a researcher at Texas Tech University, said the 24-hour-news cycle could bring about a “constant state of high alert” in some people, making the world seem like a “dark and dangerous place.”
“For these individuals, a vicious cycle can develop in which, rather than tuning out, they become drawn further in, obsessing over the news and checking for updates around the clock to alleviate their emotional distress,” he said.
“But it doesn’t help, and the more they check the news, the more it begins to interfere with other aspects of their lives.”
Photo: AP
About 27.3 percent of those surveyed reported “moderately problematic” levels of news consumption, 27.5 percent were minimally impacted and 28.7 percent experienced no problems.
While some readers can comfortably receive news updates without any tangible psychological effects, others demonstrate a more compulsive obsession with the media, and struggle to detach themselves from the bad news they’re reading.
These respondents scored high on five problematic news consumption dimensions listed by the researchers: becoming absorbed in news content, being preoccupied with thoughts about the news, attempting to reduce anxiety by consuming more news, finding it difficult to avoid the news and having news consumption interfere in their daily life.
Photo: AFP
And those with higher levels of problematic news consumption were “significantly more likely” to experience poor mental and physical health, the survey found, even when controlling for demographics, personality traits and overall news use.
Of those with severely problematic consumption levels, 74 percent reported experiencing mental health problems and 61 percent reported physical problems compared to 8 percent and 6.1 percent of all other study participants.
“We did anticipate that a sizable portion of our sample would show signs of problematic news consumption. However, we were surprised to find that 17 percent of study participants suffer from the most severe level,” McLaughlin said.
“This is certainly concerning and suggests the problem may be more widespread than we expected. A lot of people appear to be experiencing significant amounts of anxiety and stress due to their news consumption habits.”
Kate Mannell, a media studies researcher at Deakin University in the Australian state of Victoria, said COVID-19 made the public “more inclined” to engage in doomscrolling because of the amount of bad news, coupled with extra spare time.
Mannell studied the impact of news consumption on Victorians affected by strict COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. She found partial news avoidance was beneficial for the well being of surveyed participants, who reported being less distracted and calmer at home.
“People weren’t avoiding it completely, but were taking conscious steps to limit their news consumption after realizing [it] had become unhealthy,” she said.
“They found strategic ways of staying informed … doing one longer form piece of news engagement or going directly to public health.”
Mannell said for news addicts the key was acknowledging when it became detrimental to health, rather than encouraging people to switch off media entirely.
“We’re in an unstable world,” she said. “We’re going to have increasing climate catastrophes — crisis contexts in place around COVID are going to become more prevalent.
“Becoming stressed and anxious is a legitimate natural reaction to the world around you, but it’s important … people are able to gauge when [news consumption] becomes problematic.”
The Nuremberg trials have inspired filmmakers before, from Stanley Kramer’s 1961 drama to the 2000 television miniseries with Alec Baldwin and Brian Cox. But for the latest take, Nuremberg, writer-director James Vanderbilt focuses on a lesser-known figure: The US Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who after the war was assigned to supervise and evaluate captured Nazi leaders to ensure they were fit for trial (and also keep them alive). But his is a name that had been largely forgotten: He wasn’t even a character in the miniseries. Kelley, portrayed in the film by Rami Malek, was an ambitious sort who saw in
Last week gave us the droll little comedy of People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) consul general in Osaka posting a threat on X in response to Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi saying to the Diet that a Chinese attack on Taiwan may be an “existential threat” to Japan. That would allow Japanese Self Defence Forces to respond militarily. The PRC representative then said that if a “filthy neck sticks itself in uninvited, we will cut it off without a moment’s hesitation. Are you prepared for that?” This was widely, and probably deliberately, construed as a threat to behead Takaichi, though it
Among the Nazis who were prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946 was Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Goring. Less widely known, though, is the involvement of the US psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who spent more than 80 hours interviewing and assessing Goring and 21 other Nazi officials prior to the trials. As described in Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, Kelley was charmed by Goring but also haunted by his own conclusion that the Nazis’ atrocities were not specific to that time and place or to those people: they could in fact happen anywhere. He was ultimately
Nov. 17 to Nov. 23 When Kanori Ino surveyed Taipei’s Indigenous settlements in 1896, he found a culture that was fading. Although there was still a “clear line of distinction” between the Ketagalan people and the neighboring Han settlers that had been arriving over the previous 200 years, the former had largely adopted the customs and language of the latter. “Fortunately, some elders still remember their past customs and language. But if we do not hurry and record them now, future researchers will have nothing left but to weep amid the ruins of Indigenous settlements,” he wrote in the Journal of
RSS