Gaslight

Since I started my private practice two years ago, I've had to pay careful attention to social media trends in mental health messaging. This is increasingly the language people use, in session and in life, to describe emotional and psychological pains and discomforts. These are the terms they mobilize to articulate difficulties in their relationships with others.

Social media content can be viral not only in the breadth of their spread, but also in its invasive nature. In the early days of COVID, mixed messages circulated at lightning speed. We didn't know what to believe, or who to listen to. In the early days of COVID, public health officials and politicians scrambled to adapt measures and recommendations to what little we knew about a new virus. There is no doubt that they got some things wrong, but they acted on the information they had from specialists on infectious disease. Although little was known about the virus, we learned a lot very quickly,  in part because of the degree of contagion and the potential severity of the illness.

As complicated as it was finding reliable sources in regard to COVID, it is significantly harder with something as intangible as mental health. While social media can bring people together around shared challenges and experiences, issues of mental health can also fall victim to polarizing, simplistic, click-bait content in the same way everything else does . The spread and impact of such messages is more subtle than the COVID numbers that framed everyday life for awhile. We consume these messages and they influence us. Tourette's syndrome, a rare disorder with an estimated prevalence of 1% (Roessner, Hoekstra & Rothenberger, 2011) has seen a recent spike in diagnosis, which some physicians have speculated may be related to continuous exposure to TikTok videos about the disorder. This has led some researchers to suggest the need to recognize a new "Tourette-like disorder" that spreads through social media, with symptoms consistent with those of the influencers the adolescents followed (Müller-Vahl, Pisarenko, Jakubovski & Fremer, 2022).

The viral content builds us, as much as we build the content.

In Canada, access to mental health professionals is limited. We have begun in recent years to speak more openly about mental health issues, but if the resources and conversation is dominated by what circulates on social media, we are not doing ourselves any favours.

"Gaslighting" was just declared the word of the year by Merriam-Webster. This is not surprising to me. They found a 1740% increase of searches for its definition on their site in 2022 (NPR, 2022). I hear it so much in my sessions to describe relationship dynamics that I think a lot about how people understand it and how they use it.

When I first heard the term, I recalled an old play that I'd read in theatre school called "Gaslight" by Patrick Hamilton (1938). I remembered little of the play, but traces of its elaborate psychological manipulation remained with me. I remembered being deeply disturbed by it.

This is in fact where the term "gaslighting" originated from, so I reread the play. A man murders an elderly woman in her home, in search of valuable jewels he knows to be hidden there but never found. Years later and newly married, he returns to the scene of the crime as a resident of that home. Over the course of the play, we discover that he manipulated this woman into marrying him because she had the means to purchase the house. Every night, he continues his careful search for the jewels,  simultaneously exercising various methods that control and alter his wife's perception of reality. He has the house, so he doesn't need her anymore.

What strikes me about the contrast between the play and what seems to be the popular use of the term today, is that in the play, there really is no relationship between the husband and wife. She existed only to acquire the house for him. She is not a person to him, she's a tool until she's an inconvenience.

Today, gaslighting is employed to label relationship dynamics. In my experience, this comes with the significant risk of shutting down conversation about different perspectives and ways of understanding. Relationships are complicated because they involve two different people sharing in life experiences together. Differences in every day experiences are part of that. It takes energy, patience, openness and compassion to have conversations about difference. This is particularly difficult when we are angry, hurt or unhappy.

I am not suggesting that gaslighting does not exist. There are, without question, people who go to extremes to control and manipulate those around them. Most people are not gaslighters though. A much more common problem is difficulty in communicating thoughts and feelings. I'm suggesting that the dynamics of relationships deserve careful, nuanced thought. This wasn't required of the wife character in the play, because there was no relationship in the first place. In fact, she discovers that they were not married in the first place, as her husband was already married to another woman, rendering their marriage null and void.

I encourage those facing challenges in their relationships to reach out for professional support. An encouraging trend that I've noticed in the last two years is the number of young couples seeking support early in their relationship. They are hoping to anticipate difficulties, facilitate growth and foster a deeper understanding of one another. Presumably, normalizing discussions about mental health has played a role in this. Mindful engagement with any social media content can expose us to new possibilities for engagement and growth. It can be a powerful tool for connection, rather than a way of driving us apart.

Click here to access the Canadian Mental Health Association's petition for universal mental health and substance use services:

https://www.actformentalhealth.ca/