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Posts Tagged ‘Mental’

Selfitis, the obsessive taking of selfies, may be a real mental disorder

30 Dec

A viral article published in 2014 claimed that the American Psychiatric Association had established a new mental disorder called “selfitis” — that is, the obsessive taking of selfies. That article, though fake, inspired a real exploratory study to determine whether a condition like the one described in the article could exist…and, the research shows, it very well may.

Of note, the fake viral article had claimed that selfitis existed across three levels of severity: borderline, acute, and chronic. To determine whether that could be true, researchers Mark D. Griffiths and Janarthanan Balakrishnan conducted interviews with a focus group of 225 Indian university students to attempt to create what they called the Selfitis Behavior Scale (SBS) based on those three severities.

Having created the SBS, and as explained in the recently published study, the researchers then attempted to validate it using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). For this, they recruited 734 total students, and identified 400 students as belonging to one of the three severity categories they’d outlined — the breakdown being 34% borderline, 40.5% acute, and 25.5% chronic. The most severely affected age group was 16- to 20-years-old at 56%, while 21 to 25 was the next highest age group at 34%. As well, men represented 57.5% of the categories, while women represented 42.5%.

As a result of the EFA, the two researchers were also able to identify half a dozen factors referred to in the study as “selfitis motivations” — they include social competition, seeking attention, modifying mood, boosting self-confidence, conformity, and enhancing one’s environment.

The researchers note that the study has some limitations, including that the data was self-reported and “subject to many well-known biases.” However, it indicates that a mental disorder like “selfitis” could possibly exist and that it is worth further investigation. “As with internet addiction,” the study states, “the concepts of “selfitis” and “selfie addiction” started as a hoax, but recent research including the present paper has begun to empirically validate its existence.”

Via: PetaPixel

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Why Photography is Beneficial for Your Mental Wellness

27 Nov

I initially took up photography for one simple reason – I couldn’t draw. My 16-year-old self reasoned that photography must be pretty easy. Just point the camera and shoot, right? But as I worked away in the high school darkroom, I realized how powerful the camera is for artistic output. And as I built up my own photographic practice, I got to see another side of photography too, its therapeutic qualities.

It tasks photographers with the opportunity to truly see an environment, making the most out of any situation. Photography requires adaptability and focus, driving photographers to chase that elusive perfect shot. This is why many people find photography so effective for cultivating good mental health.

Why Photography is Beneficial for Your Mental Wellness

There is a unique satisfaction in executing a photograph you are happy with.

Mental health is a vast topic. It plucks external experiences and mashes them with physiology indiscriminately. Personally, I feel like photography isn’t just about cameras and photos, but consistency. Something I can fall back on when times get tough. Often I find that photography can be the difference between a good or a bad day – that’s pretty powerful stuff.

Here are a few ways that I’ve found photography to be beneficial for my own mental wellness.

Motivation

From the earliest stages of photographic study, the camera trains the eye to seek out detail and opportunity. Whether you notice it or not, chances are you’ll quickly begin to see the world through the perimeter of the viewfinder – camera in hand or not. A photographer’s process is often cyclical – seeking out subjects will drive you to document them photographically. And to photograph those subjects adequately, you’ll need a discerning eye. One feeds the other and motivation fuels both.

I’m a bit of an aviation nerd, so taking photographs of something I love always picks me up emotionally.

But the relationship between photography and motivation can be tenuous. Sticking with photography in better times creates a sense of stability in harder periods. Chasing the elusive “perfect shot” and the afterglow of a photo session slowly starts to become a necessity – instilling resilience.

We photographers are lucky in that we have a self-contained tool to reach out to. Photography opens an inexhaustible amount of doors, providing opportunities to explore, travel, experiment and grow experience. It also helps form relationships with different places and subjects, leading to tangible locations that are a haven for low days. A valuable self-care technique.

People on the outside may not understand a photographer’s inner workings or mental well being, but even the smallest of accomplishment spills over to a new day, easing the complex difficulties experienced in a low. Photography has many benefits and it all comes down to taking a camera in your hands.

Why Photography is Beneficial for Your Mental Wellness

Photography can take you to amazing places.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness can be an important fixture in mental health. Usually, you’d think of yoga or meditation when discussing it. But it’s no different for photographers.

This is a time to take stock of your mental landscape. It encourages a state of attentiveness to your surroundings and your own thinking. Whenever you bring awareness to your own senses, you are being deliberately mindful. It’s almost like hitting a reset button for a moment, taking a breath, and paying attention to your sensory experience.

Mindfulness has been found to reduce stress and rumination, working memory, focus, and self-insight.

Why Photography is Beneficial for Your Mental Wellness

Photography isn’t just like mindfulness, it is mindfulness. Photography requires a deep focus on all of the body’s sensory input to seek out photographic subjects. It prioritizes the actions involved in photography first – avoiding some sort of sensory overload.

This deep sense of a photographer’s surroundings transforms a moment into a carefully considered image, even in a split second And it all comes together to form one fluid moment, with each click of the shutter activated with purpose and reason. As Don McCullin, documentary and war photographer said,

“Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you are looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures”.

Why Photography is Beneficial for Your Mental Wellness

Green is the color our eyes are most sensitive to. Seeking out nature, even in an urban environment can cultivate mental well being.

Perspective

From it’s earliest incarnations, photography has shaped our understanding of the world. Eadweard Muybridge is known for his photography of the Mid West. But he shifted his focus to a more scientific endeavor when Leland Stanford, a race-horse owner asked that he could study the dynamics of a horse’s gallop.

Muybridge had been tasked with breaking down what the eye could not. Up until Muybridge’s efforts, most artists painted horses at a trot with one foot always on the ground. But Myubridge’s use of photography revealed the horse’s gait was performed with all the feet in the air over the course of each stride. His method was one of the early uses of perspective in photography, revealing the scientific potential of the camera.

Why Photography is Beneficial for Your Mental Wellness

Taking advantage of an interesting perspective is a valuable form of-self expression.

Why Photography is Beneficial for Your Mental Wellness

Photography can reveal beauty with a simple change in perspective. The mental gymnastics required to form an unusual image slowly becomes second nature, aiding with racing thoughts and anxiety.

Photographers make use of both mental and physical perspective to re-imagine the world. Sometimes a new perspective is physical, or it reflects the inner machinations of a photographer’s process. Inspiration can hit at any time – that’s why I try to keep a camera with me as much as possible.

Thinking, planning, investigating, scouring. Photographers make use of personal experience to convey a new way of digesting a scene, both deliberately and on purpose. The result is an unusual insight into a subject. This genuine approach can reveal a greater faith in your own photography. But it also encourages relationships between a viewer and the photographer.

This contentedness cultivates awareness, thoughtfulness, and insight. This sharing of ideas is also cathartic and mentally beneficial – a  problem shared is a problem halved.

Conclusion

Why Photography is Beneficial for Your Mental Wellness

Photography leaves your mark on the world.

Artists have always translated art from the mental manifestations of the artist. Photography cultivates thought, inspiration, awareness, and focus. Your photography reflects your own experience – creating new perspectives and connections with people. Art can flip perspective upside -down.

Buy honing in on your own experiences, you can cultivate a mindfulness in your practice that flows into the heights of creativity and eases some of the burdens of mental lows.

The post Why Photography is Beneficial for Your Mental Wellness by Megan Kennedy appeared first on Digital Photography School.


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Another study finds Instagram is terrible for youth mental health

22 Jul

Anti-bullying organization Ditch the Label has released its Annual Bullying Survey 2017 research paper, something it calls the ‘largest annual benchmark of bullying behaviors’ in the UK. The report, which is free for anyone to download, set its focus on technology this time around, seeking to understand the current state of cyberbullying, online behaviors and other things concerning modern youth. More than 10,000 volunteers aged 12 to 20 were surveyed for this report.

According to the report, 69% those surveyed reported having engaged in abusive online behaviors at some point, and 1-in-2 reported having experienced bullying of some sort. The second half of the report looks specifically at online bullying, and concludes that out of the popular social media sites and apps, Instagram is the worst offender. Of those surveyed, 42% report having experienced cyberbullying on Instagram, with Facebook coming in second at 37% and Snapchat in third at 31%.

This isn’t the first study to find a correlation between Instagram and negative experiences. A study published earlier this year by the Young Health Movement and Royal Society for Public Health found that Instagram was the worst social network for mental health among young users. Per that study, Instagram was found to fuel anxiety, depression, fear of missing out, body image issues and more.

Ditch the Label exposes one of the biggest issues related to these negative mental effects via its video above. Many users report editing images in some way before posting them on Instagram and similar social networks; high exposure to these staged, edited, and otherwise carefully-presented images can create unrealistic expectations about life and how others are living, causing many users to feel inadequate or as if their lives are less interesting than others’.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Lier Mental Hospital

28 Oct

Photos taken inside an abandoned mental institution.

 
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