The fourteenth reason why

Parents everywhere must suddenly be keeping a sharp and nervous eye on their children’s time with their phones and computers. And so they should. By now, everyone’s aware of the Blue Whale Challenge online that seems to hook youngsters into taking up fifty challenges, all involving self harm, starting easy but eventually meant to end in the victim’s suicide — something that at least 130 kids have obligingly completed, some right here in India.

Governments, especially ours, immediately reached out for the easiest solution — ban the Blue Whale. Get the tech giants to prevent access to it. Not a bad idea. But probably not enough. In today’s tech-driven society, the Blue Whale isn’t the first, last or only threat of its kind and nor is it the whole picture.

Just as in the Netflix show 13 Reasons Why, where a young and rather pretty high-school girl lists, on 13 cassettes, all that hurt her enough to take her own life, depression can be brilliantly masked in teenagers with adults around never guessing what hurts them. Perhaps teenagers with their own set of thirteen reasons find a cruel social game like the Blue Whale making up the fourteenth reason.

The creator of the Blue Whale Challenge, a 22-year-old Russian named Philipp Budeikin tried to play God (or Hitler) and weed out the ineffectual and debilitated from society, but is it any longer just the vulnerable who take the bait?

Dr Sujatha Sharma, consultant clinical psychologist working at Parivartan Centre for Mental Health and co-creator of a mental health primer TV show called, coincidentally enough, ‘Mann ki Baat,’ points out that while it’s easy enough to assume the teens who fall prey to the Blue Whale are all depressed and from dysfunctional families, we need to look more deeply into their histories.

“We don’t really know much about the background of the children who are giving in to this Blue Whale challenge and pressure groups online, allowing themselves to be completely brain-washed,” says Dr Sharma. “Are they low achievers? Are they loners and totally friendless? Or is something else at work here?”

Taking on a dare is something that youngsters like to do. “Many teens have a strong thrill seeking need,” says Dr Sharma.

“It’s more common in children who have conduct disorders, attention deficit disorder and other problems. They compulsively seek out thrills and are wired to seek excessive stimulation. But what other personality aspects are involved, we still need to understand. With this ‘game’ and each level being ‘achieved’ the teen graduates to the next but the problem is that what seems like a game and a thrill as long as it is online suddenly becomes very real — and then it is too late.” This misplaced sense of achievement stands confusingly between the real and the virtual.

What we need to give serious thought to is whether technology, the internet and social media changing our society as fast as they are, may perhaps be creating a totally new genre of mental health problems. In just the past ten years we can see how the social web has spawned a new kind of exhibitionism, forged connections with people we would never meet, and created a different world within a world, the intersection of which we barely understand yet. The clash of different realities may well be changing the fabric of society as we knew it.

As if this weren’t enough, teenagers in any case tend to keep adults out of their world for the most part. While there are parents and children who are open with with each other, it is just as common to have youngsters who keep their world entirely to themselves and shut adults out. The two soon begin to speak different languages as it were, just not understanding or being tolerant of each others’ point of view. But continuing to be pressured from family and school, children then find other connections to make up their virtual-real world. “Self harm has always existed with children. Take cutting, for example,” says Dr Sharma, “But never has it been so structured. The permanent availability of gadgets to go online allows activities that are putting a serious strain on family life,” she said.

Delhi-based consultant psychiatrist Dr Alok Sarin believes that the disconnect between teens (or even young adults) and their parents has always existed but that it takes new shapes now.

“Teenage angst is finding new and more ‘exquisite’ forms of expression today,” he says, pointing out that the lure of dramatic and clever ways of doing self harm is difficult to resist for some. And it’s easier for young people to be seduced by online pressure groups. Indeed, nowhere is that clearer than in the radicalisation of youngsters who are eager to leave home and join terrorist groups.

Snatching away a youngster’s gadgets is unlikely to be the answer as it leaves the underlying unhappiness and alienation worsened. Nor is forcing a frank talk outside of a close relationship. What’s clear is that parents need to understand their teenagers better and arm themselves with knowledge about the troubled teen years in general, if there’s any hope of bridging that disconnect.

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