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Mental health
Research
Self-harm and social media: thematic analysis of images posted on three social media sites
  1. Nicola Shanahan,
  2. Cathy Brennan,
  3. Allan House
  1. Division of Psychological and Social Medicine, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Cathy Brennan; C.A.Brennan{at}leeds.ac.uk

Abstract

Objectives To explore the nature of images tagged as self-harm on popular social media sites and what this might tell us about how these sites are used.

Design A visual content and thematic analysis of a sample of 602 images captured from Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.

Results Over half the images tagged as self-harm had no explicit representation of self-harm. Where there was explicit representation, self-injury was the most common; none of these portrayed images of graphic or shocking self-injury. None of the images we captured specifically encouraged self-harm or suicide and there was no image that could be construed as sensationalising self-harm.

Four themes were found across the images: communicating distress, addiction and recovery, gender and the female body, identity and belonging.

Conclusions Findings suggest that clinicians should not be overly anxious about what is being posted on social media. Although we found a very few posts suggesting self-injury was attractive, there were no posts that could be viewed as actively encouraging others to self-harm. Rather, the sites were being used to express difficult emotions in a variety of creative ways, offering inspiration to others through the form of texts or shared messages about recovery.

  • self-harm
  • social media
  • images

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-027006

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    Footnotes

    • Patient consent for publication Not required.

    • Contributors NS conceived the study, led on the data analysis and contributed to the manuscript preparation. CB conceived the study, was involved in data analysis and preparation of the final manuscript and will act as corresponding author. AH conceived the study, was involved in data analysis and preparation of the final manuscript.

    • Funding The work was undertaken by NS in accordance with the requirements for the award of the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Leeds.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Ethics approval This research was subject to the University of Leeds ethical procedures. Ethical approval was granted by The University of Leeds SOMREC committee (MREC 15–092).

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data sharing statement Due to copyright restrictions, we are not able to share the visual images used in this analysis.