Bystander Effect Of The Modern Age: Cries For Help Falling Into Social Media Abyss
Options are limited when a social media contact posts a message that sounds a lot like someone with a mental illness asking for help. But often, it's simply ignored. In other public health news, sometimes cancer is genetic and sometimes it all just comes down to chance.
The Washington Post:
When A Cry For Help Rings Out On Facebook, Who Answers — And How?
If the Internet is a public forum, then social media is the megaphone installed at the center of it. Certainly it attracts oversharers, the ones who hash out breakups in Facebook statuses and live-tweet their days in embarrassing detail. We lurk in the cyber shadows and tsk and snicker — this is modern voyeurism at its most entertaining. But then there are people like my acquaintance who seem to be in a different, more dangerous kind of distress that seems private but is broadcast, intentionally or not, to a wide network of onlookers. It looks suspiciously like mental illness. (Tepper Paley, 7/25)
The Washington Post:
A Family Tree Entwined By Cancer
“My paternal grandfather had breast cancer.” That always makes whoever is charting my medical history look up. “He had a radical mastectomy in the 1970s. And his sister had it, too — she died young. And one of his nieces. And his daughter — my aunt.” At age 37, I have just been diagnosed with breast cancer, and the genetic counselor is furiously sketching out my family tree on a sheet of paper. There are squares and circles, the cancer victims marked with X’s. Lots of X’s. (Riggs, 7/25)
