Five Facts About Selfies and Mental Health

1. Selfitis isn’t an official diagnosis

Back in 2014, a fake news article on the Philippine parody website The Adobo Chronicles claimed that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) had classified excessive selfie-taking as a mental disorder called “selfitis.” The story went viral, and a surprising number of people believed it was true.

Selfitis is still not an officially recognized mental disorder. Interestingly, researchers later decided to study the idea and even developed a Selfitis Behavior Scale. That, however, doesn’t turn it into an official diagnosis.

2. The link between selfies, narcissism and psychopathy

A 2015 study by researchers at The Ohio State University looked at selfie posting and personality traits in American men aged 18 to 40. Men who posted more selfies tended to score higher on measures of narcissism and psychopathy.

This doesn’t mean that men who post a lot of selfies are narcissists or psychopaths. The study found an association with higher levels of these personality traits, not a diagnosis.

The researchers also found that narcissism and self-objectification were associated with editing photos before posting them. Psychopathy, on the other hand, was associated with posting more selfies but not with editing them.

Other studies since then have also found links between selfie posting and narcissism, although the relationship isn’t as simple as “more selfies = more narcissism.”

3. Selfies and Brits

One interesting survey from the early days of the selfie craze came from smartphone company HTC. In 2015, it surveyed 2,000 British social media users between the ages of 18 and 30.

According to the survey, young British men posted an average of three selfies a week, compared with 1.6 among women. A quarter of the men said they posted selfies to make a current or former partner jealous, while one in ten said they did it to make themselves look more desirable.

Women gave somewhat different reasons. Thirty-five percent said they took selfies to share what they were doing with friends, while 26 percent said they used them to record memories.

Of course, this was a survey commissioned by a smartphone company, not a psychological study, so it’s best treated as an interesting snapshot of selfie habits at the time.

4. Selfies and Russians

The SelfieCity project analyzed Instagram selfies from Bangkok, São Paulo, New York, Moscow and Berlin. Moscow stood out in several ways.

Only about 18 percent of the Moscow selfies analyzed belonged to men. In fact, the project found 4.6 times as many female selfies as male selfies in Moscow, the biggest gender difference among the cities studied.

Moscow selfie-takers also smiled less than those in the other cities. This doesn’t mean that Russians in general don’t like selfies or don’t smile, of course. The findings came from one particular collection of Instagram photos.

5. Selfies and Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD)

In 2014, psychiatrist Dr. David Veale was widely quoted as saying that two out of three of the patients he had seen with Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) since the rise of camera phones had a compulsion to repeatedly take selfies. This was a clinical observation, rather than the result of a large study.

BDD is a real mental health disorder involving intense concern about perceived flaws in one’s appearance. People with BDD may repeatedly check their appearance in mirrors, compare themselves with others, try to hide perceived flaws, or spend a great deal of time worrying about how they look.

For some people, repeatedly taking, checking, editing or posting selfies on social media could become part of this kind of appearance checking. But taking a lot of selfies by itself doesn’t mean that someone has BDD.