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What was being a fun time watching social networks among friends ended with the death of a 13-year-old boy in Ohio (USA). Jacob Stevens was a loving, funny and polite boy, as described by his father. He played football at Greenfield Middle School, where he studied. He was with some friends at home when they joined the Benadryl Challenge, a dangerous challenge circulating on TikTok that consists of ingesting numerous pills of that antihistamine to supposedly have hallucinations. When he started convulsing, his friends who were filming him ran away scared, according to the boy's grandmother. After a week in a coma on a ventilator, Jacob died a few days ago.

It is not the only case that has been for this cause. A 15-year-old girl died in Oklahoma in 2020 after performing this challenge and three others had to be admitted to Texas months earlier for the same reason, one of them having a heart rate of 199 beats at rest.

According to a study by the Cyberpsychology research group of the International University of La Rioja (UNIR) and the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), one in 10 Spanish adolescents admits to having carried out dangerous viral challenges. Prepared last year among 417 children between 10 and 14 years of age in Aragon, Asturias and Castilla y León, the study distinguishes between social challenges, with a family or social component of fun such as dances or harmless jokes (we all remember the famous Harlem Shake 10 years ago); solidarity challenges, whose purpose is to help others or encourage good behavior (such as the Ice Bucket Challenge in favor of ALS); and dangerous challenges, which put at risk the integrity of the person doing it or others.

The alphabet of the devil, Condom Challenge, Rompebocas, Rompecranes, Cereal Challenge, inhaling 'lighter gas' (caused the death last year of a 16-year-old girl in Toledo), the challenge of ice and salt, the French scar that became popular recently, Jonathan Galindo (caused the suicide of a 10-year-old Italian boy), Blackout Challenge (for which several young people have died, among them Archie Battersbee, 12, who was disconnected by order of the British Justice after several months on life support), Momo, the blue whale (consisted of 50 tasks, the last of which was to take his own life. In Russia alone it is believed that it caused more than 100 cases of suicide), posh hunting... Blows, falls, burns, cuts, suffocation... Most incite to injure oneself, although there are those who promote hurting others. But what drives a teenager to follow these life-threatening challenges? What goes through your head so that there are more and more cases?

Guillermo Fouce, PhD in Psychology and president of Psychology Without Borders, does not believe that this is something new, typical of this generation. "Imitative risk behaviors have always been occurring. Another thing is that new technologies have enhanced them, along with international connectivity. As the internet works, in this case for bad, if one searches for certain content such as violence, death or anorexia then they will appear all the time, the search engine generates it as when you search for travel information and then they jump you all the time. Then you enter a loop in which it begins to seem normal to you what is not. New technologies change the dimension of this phenomenon and complicate it a lot."

The Werther effect and imitative risk behaviors

The psychologist talks about the Werther effect, "where this question of imitation arose that has meant that suicides were not talked about in the media, for example." In The Sorrows of Young Werther, a play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the protagonist suffers for love and ends up committing suicide. He also mentions the collective panic generated by the radio broadcast of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds. We may not realize it, but television has also used violence and cruelty to gain audiences in increasingly extreme programs.

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In that sense, Fouce mentions the documentary The Game of Death, which reproduces Milgram's experiment of electric shocks but applied to a television contest. "On an English channel there was a program that was a Russian roulette and another that was a dissection, a live autopsy. There are shows on Japanese television where you torture yourself, put fireballs in the mouths of contestants and people laugh. We have Jackass, which were more violent challenges and two films were made, it went viral at that time without the networks, "he explains.

He adds: "If it's not on television, there's no point. If it is not recorded as when they are left to stick the fight clubs it does not make sense. Or the shootings in the US, which are recorded to be seen. There is something we are doing very wrong and it is to give these imitative risk behaviors the relevance of fame, a prize for something that should not have it. In addition to adrenaline and that we laugh with violence, it generates fame and positive responses from others, people who will follow me, to give 'likes', who will imitate me. And I don't need to go to a TV show anymore, I can put it in my networks and create my own channels."

All this is related to the disconnection of the consequences that violence has on oneself or on others, Fouce stresses. "Violence or injury becomes a game, I have the excuse to keep doing it. They are alterations of perception that occur a lot in anorexia and bulimia: I hurt myself because I actually look fat and I don't like my image. We're doing all of that very badly."

A parallel phenomenon to self-harm

For Anna Sintes, head of the Self-Harm Unit at SJD Barcelona Children's Hospital, this phenomenon of viral challenges parallels self-harm, but influences them. "It's just like when a celebrity comes out saying they've self-harmed, like Angelina Jolie in 2010. He did it with good intention to fight stigma, but it caused an increase in self-harm because the intention when one throws one thing on social networks is one, but the effect it causes is another. Or the effect of the Netflix series For Thirteen Reasons, in which a girl commits suicide. A week after putting this chapter it was seen that suicide attempts increased and they had to make a website to help adolescents for a matter of social responsibility and not to look bad. Teenagers are supersensitive to everything that comes out in the media and their media now, just as for the boomers were radio and TV, are series, Instagram, TikTok ...".

Sintes acknowledges that not everyone is taking on these challenges. "On TikTok there is a lot of information about dieting and fasting and not all teenagers develop anorexia. There are people who are more vulnerable, they are more at risk, for example, those who have difficulties in social skills or low self-esteem or problems at home with their parents, those with difficulty regulating themselves emotionally when they are sad or anxious. They are a series of personal, family and social variables that make some people more vulnerable, just as in the 80s there were those who got hooked on heroin, it was everywhere, in full Movida, and some were hooked and others not. Well, now there are teenagers who are more resilient and others, more vulnerable."

The expert points out that young people do not see it as a harm, but as being part of a community. "In self-harm, two major causes are distinguished, one more at the interpersonal level, that is, reasons that have to do with the relationship with others; and intrapersonal, that is, the management of personal discomfort or more personal variables, behavior that is mediated by reinforcement: positive, if an adolescent self-harms to reduce anxiety and decreases it, that behavior is positively reinforced, even if it is dysfunctional and brings problems in the medium-long term. Or negative reinforcement if it eliminates bad feelings, for example, a teenager with anorexia who feels guilty after eating and self-harms to eliminate that unpleasant stimulus, which would be guilt."

Interpersonal includes attempts to influence the environment or communicate emotional distress to the environment. "Sometimes they are misnamed 'wake-up calls', they are demands for help because at that moment the teenager does not know how to ask for help in another way and perhaps he has seen in a classmate that he has obtained it after self-harm and they also do it. There are many reasons, you can start as a regulation of sadness or anxiety, but you can add functions if it has consequences on the environment."

20-30% of the general population has self-harmed at some time in their lives, not clinically, but as something punctual. They do not see it more serious than one day trying heroin or cocaine, as young people have done in other generations.

Within that interpersonal component is being part of a community that the psychologist said. "The issue of identity, differentiating yourself from others. There are those who need to be part of a sports club and there are those who look for a group with less cultural approval and do not see it as a harm, like these challenges of the French scar or young people who self-harm sporadically. In the general population it is estimated that 20-30% have self-harmed at some time in their lives, not clinically, but as something punctual. They don't see it as more serious than one day trying heroin or cocaine, as young people have done in other generations."

On this Fouce points out that young people feel strong and healthy. "It's kind of what we work on addictions a lot of times. ' Nothing will happen to me', 'I am in the prime of life', 'I am here to try and experiment and to take the risk'. That feeling of invulnerability and being above anything is very adolescent. Maybe in the past it was produced more with drugs and other substances and now it is with viral challenges."

José Antonio Luengo, dean of the Official College of Psychology of Madrid, speaks of "five or six variables that all together give an explanation of this phenomenon". In the first place, impulsiveness, "very significant in these ages, not thinking about the consequences of what I am going to do, but about the first effects, which basically materialize – and this is the second element – in the dictatorship of like". Through the veins of these networks runs the enjoyment of the spectators, who are the ones who truly sustain these behaviors, explains Luengo.

Another element would be the effects of widespread maladaptive use of technologies, that is, "you normalize things that are not reasonable. You do things very easily that if you thought them through you would never do them and you would see them as crazy if others did them. But because you are immersed in this kind of slavery, which is also closely linked to the slavery of the mobile device, you come to normalize and trivialize things that are important."

If to that impulsivity and that normalization of things that are not normal, Luengo continues, we add "the possibility of understanding self-harm, hurting yourself, as a not especially risky way to overcome some bad moments, the feeling of omnipotence and a certain challenge to the status quo of adults. -although in many of these occasions adolescents have behaviors that adults do not get to see or know, or even understand-, and we wrap it with the bond of the slavery of the like, which comes to contaminate psychologically to the point of losing a little the reference of why you do certain things, we find some keys that explain why a boy hurts himself right away, It shows it on the net and continues to do so. And he keeps doing it because he has viewers."

The responsibility of the spectators, those who sustain the phenomenon

For the dean of psychologists in Madrid, spectators are a key piece. "The public approves of what you do, encourages you to keep doing it and sometimes even imitates your behavior, which has an addictive character. You become addicted to others 'laughing at your grace', extolling your courage and that is why the challenges have been acquiring an increasing physical risk. The spectators enlarge your behavior, inflame it, make you feel important and that enlarges the feeling of belonging to the group and makes you more popular. It does not matter that there are reasonable young people, in quotation marks, who look at you funny and tell you 'but what are you doing' because it has much more weight that flight forward, not stopping so as not to lose the predicament that I have won, not to disappoint and not to lose the social value that I have supposedly been able to achieve. "

Luengo mentions the 2016 film Nerve. "It's seven years old, which is a lot considering how fast we're moving in technologies. At that time there was no TikTok, but the directors were visionary in posing a scenario very close to our life." In the film, the protagonist, a shy, responsible and good student girl, is encouraged to follow a game that consists of challenges that are put by the same followers of the application.

The young woman begins to acquire fame, to be pulled and the pressure felt by the protagonist leads her to increasingly dangerous challenges, "a space very typical of the darkest web. In the film it is also done live and I have no doubt that we will soon get to see that, just as we program the chapter of a series on television, that the broadcast of a challenge is scheduled at a certain time, as if it were a show. "

In any case, Luengo stresses that he does not like "to point out teenagers as brainless, because it is not true. His brain is undergoing very significant anatomical and physiological modifications, at a time when his body and his way of interpreting the world change, they go from playing badges to having the first sentimental griefs, they do not look comfortable in the mirror, influences appear, the power of fashions and aesthetic canons ... And all focused on a time when they would like to remain children, it is a real madness. In these processes and with everything mentioned before, in this kind of bacchanal that are social networks, adolescents can sometimes enter into very high-risk behaviors. But they are not 'brainless', it is a boy or girl who at that moment is impelled to do something different, extraordinary, risky because he sees that there are many others who do it and thinks 'and why not me' and because he immediately obtains a brutal reward, which is social recognition. "

  • Mental health
  • Tik Tok
  • Adolescents
  • Social Media
  • Internet
  • Articles Rocío R. García-Abadillo

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