What does watching someone die on social media do to our mental health?

Damon Young planned to avoid watching the footage of Alton Sterling's death. 

Young, editor-in-chief of VerySmartBrothas.com, read coverage about the police shooting of Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, early Tuesday morning. He wrote about the incident and discussed it with friends. 

But he refused to watch the cell phone video that captured police firing several times at a restrained Sterling, or the press conference wherein his 15-year-old son wept in front of the cameras. 

"I am making the choice not to witness another state sanctioned murder of a Black American," he said in an essay published on VSB.

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Late Wednesday night, however, he checked Instagram before going to bed. There he unexpectedly saw a brief clip of Philando Castile slumped in his car, blood soaking his white t-shirt. 

Castile, a 32-year-old black man stopped by police in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, for a purported traffic violation, was shot to death on Wednesday while reaching for his identification. His girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, broadcast the immediate aftermath live on Facebook. 

"I just spent my entire day trying not to see this other thing, and accidentally I see something that’s even more graphic of someone being murdered," Young told Mashable. 

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Then on Thursday night and Friday morning, more violent live videos emerged, this time of snipers deliberately targeting police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas. At least five officers were killed.

These back-to-back-back videos raise anew questions about what it means to bear witness to tragedy and injustice so casually. Such footage arguably creates a new class of trauma by exposing the public to horror without making the viewing audience a direct victim or bystander. 

We know little about the effects of this digital phenomenon, which dates back at least to the shooting death of Oscar Grant by a transportation police officer in Oakland, California, in 2009. That shooting later became the subject of a critically-acclaimed film, Fruitvale Station.

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One of the main reasons why research on the effects of such traumatic media exposure is so lacking is that institutional review boards, which monitor the ethics of scientific research studies, would likely raise serious concerns about purposely showing subjects such content in order to gauge the immediate and long-term consequences. 

Previous surveys and studies of adults and children who viewed television coverage of disasters, terrorist attacks and political violence indicate that watching such content can be harmful.

Yet, live footage of someone’s death, like Reynolds’ Facebook broadcast, is considerably different than traditional TV news coverage, which is edited and frequently omits the most graphic scenes. Those images are also not personally broadcast by the victim, which creates unprecedented intimacy. 

April Foreman, a psychologist who works with combat veterans as the suicide prevention coordinator at the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, said it's probably not healthy for people to repeatedly become second-hand witnesses to traumatic events, particularly if they're more sensitive or vulnerable to the content they're viewing. 

"[W]hat's happening here to me... is a slow and subtle and steady loss of humanity." 

Young's experience — as well as the collective outpouring of grief, rage and despair seen in the past few days — provides anecdotal insight about the psychological toll of viewing videos that document fatal police encounters, and it's clear the effect is multiplied when a viewer identifies with the victim. 

"It feels hyperbolic, hysterical even, to suggest that murders like the murder of Alton Sterling also kill a part of us each time it happens," Young wrote. "But what’s happening here to me — what’s behind my reaction to this, I suspect — is a slow and subtle and steady loss of humanity." 

Erica Baker, a black engineer at Slack, wrote on Medium about trying to watch a clip of Sterling's death, but not being able to finish before breaking down in tears. Baker also described a debilitating emotional response that prompted her to take the day off from work: 

To call in black would be a radical act of self care, were it available to most black people. On the day after we have watched yet another black body be destroyed by modern day slave patrols, it would be helpful for us to be able to take a day away to process. To grieve. To hurt. To be angry.

Roxane Gay, an associate professor at Purdue University and author of Bad Feminist, wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times about the fatigue of bearing witness yet again to the persistent absence of justice.  

"I don’t know how to allow myself to feel grief and outrage while also thinking about change," Gay said. 

"I don’t know how to believe change is possible when there is so much evidence to the contrary. I don’t know how to feel that my life matters when there is so much evidence to the contrary," she said.

"I don’t know how to allow myself to feel grief and outrage while also thinking about change."

By Thursday afternoon, Young was engaged in several simultaneous text and instant messaging conversations about the deaths of Sterling and Castile. 

"They were all about ways we have decided to assess and process it," he said in an interview. 

"We’re not even talking about police brutality and what needs to happen next — it was all about some form of self-care." 

That, as Young learned, is not as simple as avoiding graphic video footage. It also means deciding how he'll respond in public to the killings, even if he'd rather not write about or comment on them. 

"That's another part of this that maybe people who aren’t people of color and don’t experience these types of things might not realize," he said. 

"There’s this obligational pressure to respond."

The psychological toll manifests itself in other ways as well. 

For Young, the caught-on-video killings don't just unleash grief that he can later move past or forget; he must instead find a way to free himself, even momentarily, from the weight of knowing Sterling or Castile's fate could be his own, or that of someone he loves. 

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Foreman is working with black patients in Baton Rouge who did not know Sterling but have been affected by his death. She said that it's less important to understand whether watching the videos is "good" or "bad" for one's mental health. Instead, she focuses on the potential outcome. 

Feeling numb, she said, is a "survival mechanism" to repeated exposure to violence and trauma. There is a difference, however, between desensitization and apathy. The former helps people take positive action to make their communities more just; apathy can promote hopelessness and indifference. 

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"It is not the intensity of the emotion, but the effectiveness of the action you take that matters," Foreman said. 

Young is not sure how to respond. He finds it exhausting and frustrating that heightened scrutiny of lethal police behavior hasn't led to radical change. 

"I want to want to do something," Young told Mashable. "But I just don’t know what to do or what I’m supposed to feel."

This story has been updated. 

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