Selfitis, the obsessive taking of selfies, may be a real mental disorder
A viral article published in 2014 claimed that the American Psychiatric Association had established a new mental disorder called "selfitis" -- that is, the obsessive taking of selfies. That article, though fake, inspired a real exploratory study to determine whether a condition like the one described in the article could exist...and, the research shows, it very well may. Of note, the fake viral article had claimed that selfitis existed across three levels of severity: borderline, acute, and chronic. To determine whether that could be true, researchers Mark D. Griffiths and Janarthanan Balakrishnan conducted interviews with a focus group of 225 Indian university students to attempt to create what they called the Selfitis Behavior Scale (SBS) based on those three severities. Having created the SBS, and as explained in the recently published study , the researchers then attempted to validate it using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). For this, t...
