Long before TikTok, social media drove mental health fears

With a potential TikTok ban upon us, the negative impacts of internet culture on young people’s mental health have been making the news again. I’ve noticed something weird about the discourse, though. Commenters almost always treat it like an emergent phenomenon. The way people frame it, you’d be forgiven for thinking that TikTok and Instagram are the first time we’ve witnessed a fraught relationship between mental health and kids’ internet usage.

As the Bible tells us, there is nothing new under the sun. The internet has always been tied to mental health. We’ve been through this many times before.

Emo was, in so many ways, the blueprint for what youth culture would become.

Some of the earliest virtual communities, such as the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (better known as the WELL), quickly became places for people to vent about their personal lives, as Carmen Hermosillo described in her essay, “Pandora’s Vox.”

In “Life on the Screen,” an exploration of multi-user dungeons, a type of text-based online multiplayer role-playing game that was popular in the 1980s and ’90s, sociologist Sherry Turkle discussed how the MUDs had become “more real than real” for some users. Not only did they function as a “social laboratory” for people to experiment with everything from their personality to gender identity, but some role-playing games were straightforwardly therapeutic, with people working out issues as complicated as troubled parental relationships.

People who suffered from the controversial dissociative identity disorder, then known as multiple personality disorder, connected on bulletin board systems and Usenet newsgroups, planting the seeds of today’s “DID community,” which has grown on both Tumblr and TikTok. In the 1990s and 2000s, the world was introduced to “pro-anorexia,” a community of anorexics who did not wish to recover.

By the mid-2000s, the community and its perceived potential to spread sociogenic anorexia was so well known that it had already been covered by outlets like Salon and received its very own Oprah episode. And this is to say nothing of the newsgroup alt.suicide.holiday, which was heavily slammed for encouraging self-harm and suicide as opposed to acting as a support group for distressed users.

Digital teen angst

But no early digital community had an impact on kids’ and young adults’ mental health, both in the media and in the physical world, as emo did.

The popularization of emo — not the Rites of Spring or Sunny Day Real Estate variety, but the “rawr xDDD” type that found its home on MySpace and in Hot Topic — was a watershed moment in the history of youth culture. Emo was, in so many ways, the blueprint for what youth culture would become.

Emo was part music fandom, part outlet for experimenting with your sexuality and gender presentation, and part goth subculture that valued emotionality and self-expression above everything else. It was the first time a mainstream, commercialized, real-world subculture was influenced by social media and its ability to help kids share emotions and build identities online.

There’s a long history of emo and its development — enough to fill several books. But suffice to say, the Zoomer Internet wouldn’t be what it is without the Millennial internet, and the Millennial internet wouldn't be without emo.

Emo gained its foothold on websites LiveJournal, MySpace, and Tumblr (in that order) between 2003 and 2011, peaking in 2005.

What was remarkable about these websites at the time was how they empowered young people’s creative expression. Not only were they highly customizable, but they also provided a place for people to share their thoughts, and they usually shared them pseudonymously. While this wasn’t the first time people could do this, it was the first time middle- and high-schoolers did it en masse.

Imagine if you could somehow concretize your teen angst or get what today we know as “clout” from your inner, very teenage world. This wasn’t your grandmother’s teen angst: it was teen angst for sale at Hot Topic and going 100 mph on the information superhighway.

For example, sharing stories about self-harm became a significant part of the emo culture, as did — perhaps less concerningly — conversations about depression. It didn’t matter whether you were genuinely depressed or self-harmed or not. Talking about it and even flirting with actions like cutting yourself was a sign of “authenticity,” a sign that you belonged.

A study of emo social networking groups by Carla Zdanow and Bianca Wright revealed “a glorification, normalization, and acceptance of suicidal behaviors.” But it was this weird thing: It was still teen angst. It was still a group of kids who were looking for belonging.

Anecdotally, a lot of kids who talked about depression or cutting, like other kids who might have said naughty words in class to be edgy, were clearly performing. Some kids were attracted to the subculture because they were already depressed, and it provided a safe space for them to act out as they needed to.

But some kids were just angsty — neither “edgelords” nor genuinely clinically depressed — and medicalized the normal ups and downs of adolescence. Some would grow out of it; some wouldn’t because they were trapped in an awful feedback loop.

Blaming social media for societal ills

As the subculture grew, its association with depression went from a joke (or not so much of a joke) among insiders to a moral panic among parents. The moral panic surrounding emo, fueled by media outlets and concerned parents who painted the subculture as a threat to young people's well-being, thrust the issue of youth mental health into the forefront of public discourse.

It wasn’t the kooky hair or tight pants that parents were worried about; it was depression. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened (heavy metal fans might remember experiencing something similar), but it was the first time the internet was there to help muddy the waters.

After 13-year-old Hannah Bond committed suicide in the United Kingdom, the Daily Mail reported that it was the result of her obsession with “emo music.” The paper went on to describe the subculture as a “suicide cult” that encouraged self-hatred and self-harm, further reinforcing that emo kids were victims on multiple fronts: The mainstream didn’t understand them and misrepresented them; they were (allegedly) at a higher risk of suicide; and they were eternal outcasts.

For a time, emo kids were the ultimate victims, both in a real and imagined sense.

There really was an international “war on emos,” which, at least in Iraq, led to the deaths of dozens of young men who were perceived as gay because of their interest in emo. (It’s worth noting, even stateside, emo was linked with homosexuality.) Emo kids were also bullied and were the first group to bring attention to a new term: “cyberbullying.”

But the subculture was designed to attract misfits and outcasts looking for belonging while simultaneously reinforcing young people’s ideas that they were misfits and outcasts. It didn’t help that bands and stores provided a soundtrack and “merch” to help people express both.

This all culminated in heightened feelings of persecution that were taken quite seriously by several well-meaning adults, including emo bands themselves. To Write Love on Her Arms emerged as a nonprofit that spread awareness about self-harm and depression. It would ultimately help set the scene for other nonprofits, such as Dan Savage’s It Gets Better.

Of course, the irony of the way mental health and emo were discussed was that it probably didn’t prevent or mitigate any of the problems that the subculture was perceived as creating.

If anything, it’s likely that made the situation worse.

On the one hand, you had large numbers of the population medicalizing their teen angst, but on the other, because the emo persecution complex was so well known, people who were authentically suffering had their pain minimized as “attention-seeking” if they were from a more skeptical community.

It was a mess, and it’s a mess that’s still with us today in other forms.