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Rise and rise of selfies

One of the first teen selfies was taken by the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia using a mirror and a Kodak Brownie box camera in 1914.

A hundred years later, selfies — the weird, odd, sometimes relevant but often whacky pictures of self or a group — are all the rage thanks to smartphones. Stand-up comedian and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres’s all-star selfie set a world record at the Oscar awards this month but then the selfie ran into trouble when it was revealed that it was actually a clever product placement! It raised ethical issues. But what raises serious concerns now is when selfies become an obsession, especially with teenagers who just can’t seem to get that “right selfie”! It just might be that selfies are becoming as damaging as doctors have been warning. This is when we stop looking at selfies of stars, starlets and minor celebs who think the public is dying to catch a glimpse of their rearsides or their botoxed lips in grotesque pouts. It is time we say it is not okay to have kids spend large parts of their day with their cellphones, posting group pictures with friends. When a teenager tries to kill himself because he could not manage a “perfect” selfie, it is time for the alarm bells to ring and tell them it’s time to come back to real life.

Danny Bowman could be anyone’s college-going teenager, having fun with friends and hanging out with them. Instead, he is in hospital in the United Kingdom, all because he did not find a single acceptable selfie from the almost 200 that he took every day. It is a case of technology addiction and body dysmorphic disorder. The boy paid a heavy price for the selfies — he dropped out of college, lost touch with his friends, starved himself to a thinner figure and when it did not work, took an overdose of pills. Thankfully for him, his mother found him and rushed him to the hospital. “I was constantly in search of taking the perfect selfie and when I realised I couldn’t I wanted to die,” he said recently, recalling instances of people making rude comments about the size of his nose or the state of his skin, when he first started posting selfies at the age of 15.

The medical fraternity, meanwhile, is cautioning people about what could be a wave of people harming themselves over their selfies. “Danny’s case is particularly extreme,” says David Veal, a doctor whose clinic weaned the teen off his iPhone. “But this is a serious problem. It’s not a vanity issue. It’s a mental health one, which has an extremely high suicide rate.”