Isha Deshmukh
YouTube has created a platform for anything to be turned into entertainment -- whether it be school subjects, interesting instances in history, conspiracy theories, satirical plays or just comedy skits. The viewers range from toddlers to 70-80 year olds. Videos can rack up billions of views. However, extensive viewership brings great responsibility while producing content. But several controversies make it pretty evident that YouTubers produce content just for views and without regard for consequences.
One such incident involved controversial YouTuber Jake Paul and YouTube veteran Shane Dawson. Jake Paul is a 20 year old YouTuber that lives in an investor-funded house with 10 other YouTubers and is the “leader” of a group called Team Ten. Together they produce content involving playing pranks as dangerous as lighting a furniture-filled swimming pool on fire. Taping two people to their bed for 12 hours, calling hispanic people slurs, jumping onto a trampoline from the first floor, spending unreasonable amounts of money on personalised lego displays — these few scenes sum up Jake Paul’s content - a reckless group of people with an abundance of funds and no restraints. Jake’s personality appears to be that of a careless, wild teenager with no fear of getting hurt or hurting others. Shane Dawson produced an 8-part series on Jake’s life where he observed and analysed Jake’s past relationships, media controversies, relationships with family and home life. The most sensational element of the series was Shane going to a “therapist” to determine whether his suspicion of Jake being a Sociopath had any truth to it. The therapist in question is another YouTuber Kati Morton, who calls herself a licensed therapist making videos on mental health.
Watching a few of her videos makes one doubt her claim of being a registered therapist. She talks about various mental illnesses and disorders but goes a step ahead and tells viewers how to self-diagnose. This creates problems, with viewers diagnosing themselves with the wrong disorder, or claiming to have a disorder by over-analysing themselves in light of the limited information they are provided with. This may perhaps lead these viewers into believing that they know enough and do not need a therapist — another dangerous assumption.
In Shane’s series — The Mind Of Jake Paul — Kati and Shane try to analyse Jake based on the information that he presents to them in a limited and very public manner about his life. This series takes pop-psychology — information presented as real psychological theories that is popular in the media, but may not necessarily have any theoretical grounding — to a new level. A 45 minute video is based on Kati explaining to Shane what it means to be a Sociopath, how to spot one and how common they are. The video is edited with music and reactions one would usually relate to a horror movie, with multiple exclamations of “This is CRAZY!” and “This is so scary!” with the “therapist” herself calling the symptoms icky and gross. A sociopath is sensationalised as a character straight out of a horror movie, reduced to a person with zero empathy and self-preservation, a selfish individual who is a danger to themselves and those around them, capable of harming just about anyone. This dramatised portrayal increases stigma around sociopathy — most closely represented by antisocial personality disorder in the DSM-5.
In a video that follows, Shane apologises amid backlash for the video, claiming he got carried away and that his portrayal was wrong.
Further into the series, Shane visits Jake and spends a few days with him and the people around him and conducts multiple interviews with him and various other people. During these, he informs Jake that he has spoken to a therapist and he suspects Jake of being a sociopath, a major violation of ethics. Giving anyone a diagnostic label, let alone one that is highly misinformed, causes them and people around to see them only through the lens of the label. It also increases the chance that individuals begin to act according to the label, in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Shane also informs Jake that he will bring a therapist with him to observe Jake, but he won’t know who the therapist is, possibly leaving Jake on high alert. Kati then goes with Shane, and observes Jake and discusses her observations with Shane. She then reveals to Jake’s girlfriend that she is a therapist, and discusses his issues with her, without his consent. Kati also talks about her observations in another video, again to a third person, all the while breaking confidentiality.
The series was not only a major violation of ethics of therapy, it also reduced therapy and diagnosis to a process of labelling people with minimum context. This portrayal is harmful because both Jake and Shane have an audience mostly consisting of teenagers and this could leave them with a false impression of the gravity of mental illnesses and therapy. There is little information of how much of the series was orchestrated, and how much truth there was in what Jake said on record. This series essentially used psychological disorders to grab views, and is a new low in pop-psychology.
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