The obsessive taking of selfies is now a real mental disorder and it's called 'Selfitis'
It was all fun and games until... the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction classified the obsessive taking of selfies as a real mental illness and it's even got a name: "selfitis".
The funny thing is that just a few years back, in 2014, a hoax claimed that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) had coined 'selfitis' as a new mental disorder. It was all fake news then, but it is real now. The research that brings this new mental disorder into focus is authored by Janarthanan Balakrishnan of the Thiagarajar School of Management in Madura, India, and Mark D. Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University in Nottingham, UK.
The study establishes a Selfitis Behavior Scale (SBS) that puts people obsessively taking selfies in different categories, depending on the severity of their 'condition'. Here is a complete breakdown of the classification:
225 students from India were then examined in the study and classified in three groups of selfie takers: those with borderline, acute, and chronic 'selfitis'. It might sound funny, but this study actually found that 9% of the participants took over 8 selfies per day and 25% shared three or more of them on social media.
“Typically, those with the condition suffer from a lack of self-confidence and are seeking to ‘fit in’ with those around them and may display symptoms similar to other potentially addictive behaviors,” Balakrishnan said for the New York Post. “Now the existence of the condition appears to have been confirmed, it is hoped that further research will be carried out to understand more about how and why people develop this potentially obsessive behavior and what can be done to help people who are the most affected.”
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