Who would’ve thought that your front-facing camera feature and your Instagram could lead to a mental disorder? Just like there’s a real addiction you can have to Facebook, supposedly. That’s what the internet says anyway.
According to The Sun, “Selfitis” is a genuine mental condition that makes a person feel compelled to constantly take photos and post them on social media, psychologists say.
There’s a lot of scientific words involved in this study, but basically, if you post a ton of selfies on your social media pages, it supposedly means you “lack self-confidence” and constantly “seek to fit in.”
Now, from what I understand, I’m assuming this “study” means that if you post 462 selfies per week, then you might have a problem. Not if you post one every once in a while.
The Sun explains the entire study here.
Here’s how you can tell if you have selfitis
Answer the following 10 questions on a scale of one to five, where five is strongly agree and one is strongly disagree.
At the end add up all of your scores.
The higher your score (the highest is 200) the greater the likelihood that you suffer from selfitis.
- Taking selfies gives me a good feeling to better enjoy my environment
- Sharing my selfies creates healthy competition with my friends and colleagues
- I gain enormous attention by sharing my selfies on social media
- I am able to reduce my stress level by taking selfies
- I feel confident when I take a selfie
- I gain more acceptance among my peer group when I take selfies and share them on social media
- I am able to express myself more in my environment through selfies
- Taking different selfie poses helps increase my social status
- I feel more popular when I post my selfies on social media
- Taking more selfies improves my mood and makes me feel happy
- I become more positive about myself when I take selfies
- I become a strong member of my peer group through selfie postings
- Taking selfies provides better memories about the occasion and the experience
- I post frequent selfies to get more ‘likes’ and comments on social media
- By posting selfies, I expect my friends to appraise me
- Taking selfies instantly modifies my mood
- I take more selfies and look at them privately to increase my confidence
- When I don’t take selfies, I feel detached from my peer group
- I take selfies as trophies for future memories
- I use photo editing tools to enhance my selfie to look better than others
