Digital Self-Harm

About

teen with phone

Self-harm is the infliction of pain or injury onto oneself. Historically these behaviors have been relegated to the fringes of communities. Technology now enables new ways to foster and encourage these dangerous activities. The Human Computer Interaction (HCI) field possesses few examples of scholarships focused on self-harm. This research focuses on characterizing the presentations of non-suicidal self-harm behaviors within social computing platforms. Building on these characterizations, we can begin to look at diagnostic tools, clinical practice and tools to better understand how we can start connecting online activities related to one's mental illness to the physical presentation, detection and treatment related to their disease.

Initially, we described the shifting nature of lexical patterns associated with self-harm behaviors online. These lexical transformations highlight online practices to evade censorship by the community-at-large or the social media platform itself. Understanding these practices was pivotal in setting an accurate foundation to build upon so we can better understand the real behavior that is taking place online related to these behaviors - the terminology is a gatekeeper to finding the authentic posts online. We used the outcomes to refine data collection processes across several platforms. We then analyzed this data for the types of information being shared within social media platforms. These types included “thinspiration,” the eating disorder journey, diets and food, and connections to other mental health issues like anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder. Finally, we worked directly with clinically diagnosed patients and providers to validate the activities we uncovered online and explored their social media use leading up to initial treatment.

Partners

Funding

  • Portions of this work funded by Oracle America, Inc.

Publications and presentations

  • Nova, F. F., Coupe, A., Mynatt, E. D., Guha, S., & Pater, J. A. (2022). Cultivating the community: Inferring influence within eating disorder networks on twitter. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(GROUP), Article 7, 1–33. [link]
  • Pater, J., Nova, F. F., Coupe, A., Reining, L. E., Kerrigan, C., Toscos, T., & Mynatt, E. D. (2021). Charting the unknown: Challenges in the clinical assessment of patients’ technology use related to eating disorders. In Y. Kitamura, A. Quigley, K. Isbister, T. Igarashi, P. Bjørn, & S. Drucker (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2021 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (Article 548, pp. 1–14). Association for Computing Machinery. [link]
  • Pater, J. A., & Mynatt, E. D. (2019, November 9–13). Best practices for qualitative data collection with a vulnerable patient population [Workshop paper]. ACM Computer Supported and Cooperative Work and Social Computing Conference, Austin, TX, United States. [link]
  • Pater, J. A., & Fiesler, C. (2018 April 21–26). Does the punishment fit the “crime”? Online harassment policies and the case of self-harm [Workshop paper]. 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Montreal, QC, Canada. [link]
  • Pater, J. A., & Mynatt, E. D. (2019 March 14–16). Understanding cultural and gender differences of eating disordered behaviors on social media  [Poster session]. International Conference on Eating Disorders (ICED), New York, NY, United States.
  • Pater, J. A, & Mynatt, E. D. (2018). Characterizing the presentation of eating disorders across social media platforms – Lexical variations and behavioral archetypes. Proceedings of the 25th AED International Conference on Eating Disorders (ICED). Chicago, IL, United States.
  • Pater, J. A., & Mynatt, E. D. (2018 November 3–7). Does my research trigger you? Designing studies for patients with eating disorders [Workshop paper]. ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Social Computing, Jersey City, NJ, United States. Chancellor, S., Kalantidis, Y., Pater, J. A., De Choudhury, M., & Shamma, D. A. (2017). Multimodal classification of moderated online pro-eating disorder content. In  G. Mark, S. Fussell, C. Lampe, M. C. Schraefel, J. P. Hourcade, C. Appert, & D. Wigdor (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2017 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 3213–3226).  Association for Computing Machinery. [link]
  • Pater, J. A., & Mynatt, E. (2017). Defining digital self-harm. In C. P. Lee, S. Poltrock, L. Barkhuus, M. Borges, & W. Kellogg (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2017 ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing (pp. 1501–1513). Association for Computing Machinery. [link]
  • Chancellor, S., Pater, J. A., Clear, T. A., Gilbert, E., & De Choudhury, M. (2016). #thyghgapp: Instagram content moderation and lexical variation in pro-eating disorder communities. In D. Gergle, M. R. Morris, P. Bjørn, & J. Konstan (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th ACM conference on computer-supported cooperative work & social computing (pp. 1201–1213). Association for Computing Machinery. [link]
  • Pater, J. A., Oliver L. H., Nazanin A., and Elizabeth D. M. (2016). "Hunger hurts but starving works”: Characterizing the presentation of eating disorders online. In D. Gergle, M. R. Morris, P. Bjørn, & J. Konstan (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th ACM conference on computer-supported cooperative work & social computing (pp. 1185–1200). Association for Computing Machinery. [link]

Press

  • Parkview Health. (2019, July 12). Why digital self-harm is hidden in plain sight. [link]
  • Pitre, J. (2019, March 22). We can’t afford to be in the dark about digital self-harm – and its real-life consequences. The Globe and Mail. [link]
  • Matsakis, L. (2018. June 13). How pro-eating disorder posts evade filters on social media. WIRED. [link]
  • Kabas, M. (2016, March 11). Pro-eating disorder communities modify hashtag terms to perpetuate the movement. The Daily Dot. [link]
  • Bolton, D. (2016, March 10). Instagram’s banning of pro-anorexia content may have made the problem worse, scientists find. The Independent. [link]
  • Inglis-Arkell, E. (2016, March 9). This is what happened when Instagram banned certain pro-anorexia words. Gizmodo. [link]

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