Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

7Q
Social Media and Cultures of Mental Health (Chair, Phillipa Collin)
Anthony McCosker
Recognising Social Media’s Mental Health Intermediaries and Cultures of Activism
Mental health organisations like Beyond Blue have begun to leverage social media for promotional
campaigns, awareness and outreach, continuing a long history of the turn to creative media platforms and to
“intermediaries” to address public health issues and provide cultural forms of support. To better understand
the potential of popular social media platforms and dedicated forums for improving mental health
experiences, we need to examine the whole ecology of platforms, cultures of use and the publics or
communities that form around mental health issues. This paper reports on a study of Facebook
communities, and mental health intermediaries – those who formally or informally act to offer support and
otherwise advocate for mental health awareness. The analysis emphasises the affective labour and
complicated modes of expression, presence and absence involved in supporting social media modes of
public mental health communication.
Frances Shaw* & Julie Brownlie The Role of Empathy in Socially Mediated Responses to Suicide on Twitter
Twitter is a site for public response to events including death by suicide. This paper looks at the public
response on Twitter to five highly publicised deaths by suicide that attracted attention on social media in
2013-2014, in order to surface public discourses around suicidality on Twitter. We map types of response
across the different cases. Tweets were coded by crowd-workers across seven categories, including personal
response and grief, interpersonal blame, social commentary and activism. We provide an analysis of the
content and dynamics of the tweets across the five cases, addressing the presence (or not) of empathy and
the interplay between different types of response. We then provide a discussion of the issues at stake in
socially mediated responses to suicide, situated in the literature on grief and social media (Garde-Hansen
2010; Glasgow et al 2014; Radford & Bloch 2012), and suicide reporting (Niederkrotenthaler 2012), and the
significance of empathy to understand circulating discourses.
Natalie Hendry Intimacy through disconnection: Young women’s experience of mental illness and their visual social
media practices
Media panics about the visuality of mental illness on social media suggest the potential of emotional
contagion through images of emotional distress. In contrast, the value of social media for young people
experiencing mental illness is also framed as a space for connection, where socially isolated young people
may initiate, practice, or maintain peer connections. However social media practices that afford connection
may also enact the very connections that young people seek relief from, as young people seek out
“emotionally authentic” social media platforms as “their own space” to escape peer surveillance and social,
gendered and illness-related pressures and stigma. Social media affords affectively intimate publics
(Papacharissi, 2014) where in disconnecting from close peers, young women can make meaning of their
mental ill health through shared visual practices. I draw on fieldwork with young women, under 18 years,
engaged with a youth mental health service to argue that disconnection, rather than connection, may be a
critical theoretical framework for understanding how mental illness is intimately visualised online.
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