2023-04-22 01:40:21
In addition to raising awareness among the population, and the key role of parents and educators, psychologists believe that the industry should take measures to control certain content, not as censorship, but as protection of public health.
The phenomenon of dangerous viral challenges that have caused the death of many young people around the world continues to grow precisely because of the same viral nature of social networks. Psychologists have analyzed the causes of this enormous problem for which we all have responsibility, as viewers of these social networks.
“The one they will say has always existed, but what they will say that we now have on our screens is absolutely disproportionateit becomes something almost pathological”. “Apparently they are the seconds of this story, but they are the ones that maintain it because without spectators the phenomenon would crumble like a sugar cube in hot water. Spectators are the ones who reign in this sort of spectacle that life on social networks is turning into.. If we did not have that certainty that the likes they are going to make us feel good and they are going to increase our self-esteem, none of these behaviors will be maintained at all”, emphasizes José Antonio Luengo, dean of the Official College of Psychology of Madrid.
What can we do to avoid all this vicious circle? The experts agree that it is not easy, but they all believe that, in addition to educating the population and the role of parents and educators, certain measures should be taken by the industry.
Legislate not to censor, but as public health measures
“The most brutal things are going to continue happening to people because it is an incline without limits,” believes Guillermo Fouce, PhD in Psychology and president of Psychology Without Borders, who points out that it is vital to reconnect the consequences of what is done. . “Violence is not a game, self-harm is not a game. Putting him back in an abnormal situation, it is not normal, would be the second step. And there must be rules that prevent this from being done, we have to cut his communication.There should be a regulation of the network so that many things were prevented and that should not be interpreted as a limitation of freedom, but as a protection of public health“.
The psychologist points out that there are many examples on the internet. “From how to make MDMA to how to make a weapon or a bomb, These things are a crime and should be prosecuted and prevented from being freely accessible. It is one of the things that should be regulated and that we are doing wrong, without a doubt. And there is technology to do it because it is done with sex and with nude images, so it could be done with these contents, even if they always say they can’t control it.”
Can you put ‘doors to the field’ of the internet?
Anna Sintes, head of the Self-Injury Unit of the Sant Joan de Du Hospital, claims not to know what should be done at the level of society in general because “we are slow making laws and we are far behind technological advances“. But as a mental health expert points out that she has to inform and train adolescents, parents and teachers, “give everyone who is involved healthy coping strategies so that the kids are stronger and have the ability to resist these phenomena. If they ask us for advice from the communication or legislative sector, we also participate, but I am afraid that little attention is paid to us, although from the different associations of psychologists and psychiatrists we work to make a psychoeducation of the population.
The expert insists that it is difficult “to make laws that influence a Meta-type company, which runs Facebook, Instagram… It can be limited, like TikTok now, which limits minors under 18 to one hour a day, but these companies are not going to promote mental health unless they are interested in following or making money or looking good. A very beastly censorship would have to be done and it would come out from another site, that is, censoring is not the solution either. It is necessary to regulate with the information of experts, but it is difficult to do it”.
Luengo also thinks, like Fouce, that there is a lot of hypocrisy on the internet and that the industry has to do something because when they want to they do it depending on what content. “I’m not saying invent the ‘supergate’ of the internet field, but we will have to limit some issues as is being done in some countriesthat it is not so easy to access certain things”.
Homeschooling: what parents can do
Something is very clear to Luengo: “This is not going to stop, but it is everyone’s responsibility to do something“. Beginning with the parents. “Parents do not lose ability, but we do lose interest in things, while young people get involved in novelties as if their lives depended on it. Parents have the obligation to know which are those spaces in which they move, it is not worth that “I just don’t know about this”, we will have to go to someone who can inform us to be able to talk to our children.
The dean of Madrid psychologists remembers when he sat down several years ago with his son who was 14 and told him ‘we are going to enter some pages where we are going to see things that you should not see’. “It is important that they know that we know about this and that they hear us say ‘you are going to make a mistake, you are going to get into places that are not appropriate, you are going to be impelled at times to do things that are not appropriate, but I am not going to judge you'”.
Then he assures that physical challenges in controlled, not virtual, environments have always occurred. “I’m going to do the fifth somersault by jumping off the springboard or to see who can climb the top of the tree or we’d take our bikes and jump down some infernal slopes. It was our way of having fun and there were also challenges. Of course, sometimes you fell and There have been some broken arms, but they were not viral, they stayed in the environment of the 10-12 friends who were there doing the shrimp because it was impossible for the process to go viral, beyond the fact that our parents found out later. them and not to accuse them or tell them ‘be careful, be careful’, that is useless, but to tell them “When you get into a mess, you tell me that I’m going to help you, I’m going to accompany you”“.
The role of educational centers
A second element for this psychologist has to do with the work that teachers can develop in educational centers. “It is developing, but we are always behind, we are slow. we are using a model that does not work very well, which is the expert talk. I go there and I tell the kids, or the police or whatever professional. I’m not saying that it goes in one ear and out the other, but it doesn’t work. We do know that there are methods they do, for example, train kids over the age of 14-15-16 and have them work with the little ones, tell them about their experiences. They listen to these kids a lot more, but in the educational centers we have to create spaces for that mediation work that the older kids can do with the younger ones.”
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