2023-10-10 15:43:35
Once upon a time, anxiety, depression and stress marked the perimeter of the mental disorders best known to the population, even just by having a relative or friend who suffered from it. Today, with the advent of the web first and social media later, even the language of ‘mental well-being’ changes and new terms have arrived to broaden this increasingly elastic perimeter. Or others already known to professionals have begun to circulate more intensely, relaunched by those who disseminate mental health on Twitter, Instagram or TikTok. World Mental Health Day is an opportunity to review some of them, especially the new ones. ADHD or attention deficit syndrome; burnout or burn-out syndrome; coping; Fomo or ‘Fear of missing out’, the fear of being excluded; Mindfulness or awareness; Trigger and the ‘trigger warning (Tw)’, the stressful reaction to traumatic images and stories.
ADHD or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It has been known by doctors since the beginning of the 20th century, it is “a disorder of the neuropsychic development of children and adolescents, characterized by hyperactivity, impulsiveness, inability to concentrate which generally manifests itself before the age of 7”, as highlighted the Higher Institute of Health (ISS). With the advent of the web and social media, this disorder has often been associated with the abuse of the internet or video games, receiving great attention from alarmed parents.
Burnout or burn-out syndrome has also been included by the World Health Organization (WHO) among the new mental health problems of workers and is the decrease in work efficiency linked to lack of energy, exhaustion, stress and tiredness, which can influence people’s health and well-being. A sort of ‘work exhaustion’ which particularly affects some professions, such as doctors subjected to grueling shifts.
Coping. The term derives from the English verb ‘to cope’ or face. We refer to a person’s ability to have mental and behavioral strategies to manage, or indeed face, problematic situations. We talk about ‘coping’ when a subject perceives an event as more stressful the more poorly suited he or she is to dealing with it. “Health psychology has been very concerned with coping – reports the Italian Society of Clinical Medical Psychology – especially in reference to the way in which people deal with pain and illness. It has been found that the way in which a person lives one’s illness significantly influences one’s personal state of psychophysiological well-being”.
Fomo or ‘Fear of missing out’ is the fear of being excluded or ‘cut off’ from the circle of friends or acquaintances. People with high levels of ‘Fomo’ use social media more so they can always stay connected to what others are doing. With the boom of the ‘digital self’ it has increasingly become a trending word in web searches. It is also associated with Fobo or ‘Fear of better options’, the fear of not making the best decisions.
Mindfulness or mindfulness phenomenon. It is an English term that indicates awareness and allows you to move from a state of suffering to a subjective perception of well-being, thanks to profound knowledge of mental states. “As always happens, the more fashionable something is, the more it risks being misunderstood, trivialized and sometimes even reversed compared to its actual meaning – underlines the Order of Psychologists of Lazio on its website – The great potential of mindfulness, however, is not obscured nor compromised by reductive or incompetent uses, and when well understood, awareness practices represent one of the lines of development and one of the liveliest, richest and ‘generative’ frontiers in the contemporary panorama of research on the nature of the mind and work on discomfort”.
Triggers and ‘trigger warnings’. In the world of social media, used with Tw or ‘trigger warning’, it is a sort of warning. The origin comes from ‘to trigger’, that is, when a stimulus brings to mind a previous traumatic experience. Trigger warnings on social media or on the web allow you to choose whether to continue reading or watching content, evaluating the stability of your psychological balance at that moment and preparing to better manage your reactions.
#burnout #coping #Fomo #ABC #mental #disorders