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Psychologists claim that taking three or more selfies a day could be a sign of mental illness.
In 2014, a spoof news article coined the term "selfitis," saying that the American Psychiatric Association was going to start recognising it as a real disorder.
Three years on, two researchers have looked at the term and have decided there could be some truth to it.
Psychologists Mark D. Griffiths and Janarthanan Balakrishnan have published a paper in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, in which they argue that selfitis is a real condition, and can be diagnosed as excessive selfie taking.
They also developed a "Selfitis Behaviour Scale" by surveying the selfie behaviour of 400 participants from India. The scale assesses the severity of the condition, of which there are three levels.
India was chosen for the study as the country has the most selfie-related deaths. Out of 127 selfie-related deaths that have been reported worldwide between March 2014 and September 2016, 76 occurred in India.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday January 16 2018, @07:59PM (2 children)
You just went wrong by listing people who actually do something complex, even if it doesn't add value.
How about Dealership Salesmen, Walmart Greeters, half of the waiting staff in most US restaurants, so many Pentagon employees, TV talking heads, and anyone whose primary income comes from social media posts? (list non exhaustive, sadly)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 16 2018, @08:44PM (1 child)
No, I didn't go wrong at all, you misunderstood my point. I was specifically pointing to workers who supposedly do "real", "productive" work as opposed to bullshit like car salesmen and Walmart greeters. How much better would society function if the engineers and technicians at Chrysler didn't do their jobs, and instead went to work at a better car company? It might not be good for the mechanics who profit from unreliable junk Chrysler/Jeep vehicles, but for society overall, it'd be better. How much better would society function if we didn't have UI/UX people replacing well-designed interfaces with ugly, flat-UI, dumbed-down monstrosities? How about the engineers who design laptop keyboards? Society would be better off it they were simply out of work, and the laptop makers were forced to just keep using the designs from circa 2010. Society would be better off if the engineers and factory workers at Frigidaire factories were all laid off, and consumers were forced to buy from better brands like Bosch, Samsung, LG, etc. How have the countless tech people who worked on Apple Maps contributed to society, when there were already so many far-better mapping and navigation applications? Society would be much better off too if Microsoft had been forced to lay off all their UI/UX people before coming up with Metro, and had been forced to just stick with the Windows 7 UI.
That's my point here. We engineers and tech people deride Walmart greeters, TV talking heads, and similar workers as "useless", but there's tons of us who also do useless "bullshit jobs" and ultimately add negative value.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by arcz on Tuesday January 16 2018, @10:22PM