Social media triggers 'emotional change' in Indians

MUMBAI: When Dr Bhavesh Lakdawala, a psychiatrist practising in Ahmedabad, underwent a "near-death experience," among the first things he did on recovering was to post his story on a social networking website.
His post began with, "It was near death Experience for me (sic). I had 2 episodes of Generalized Tonic Clonic Seizures with tongue bite and unconsciousness on 6th June while visit to Saputara first time in my life (sic)."
Generalized tonic clonic seizures, or grand mal, are generalized seizures that affect the entire brain and are known as one of the most frightening epileptic fits to watch.
Lakdawala is not the only doctor who has, in times of tragedy, reached out to friends and well-wishers through social media. Mumbai-based psychiatrist Harish Shetty tells of a colleague who posted about his dying mother. Another doctor used social media to talk about his son's accident and yet another put up sentimental 'I miss you' messages for his wife when he was on an America tour.
"For the last six months or so, I have noticed doctors using Facebook to communicate about their personal life. A friend signed off a post saying 'love you'. These are emotions people a decade back would never have openly expressed,'' said Dr Shetty.
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Indians, Dr Shetty feels, are going through an "emotional change." Known for long for stoicism, they are verbalizing their feelings on social media. And social networking sites, a recent research paper from Cornell University has revealed, are helping to spread the emotional contagion. They help trigger positive or negative emotions depending on the content a user gets on his/her feed.
Psychiatrists feel that social media platforms are helping to "accelerate an emotional shift" among Indians. Previously seen as stoical, they are now unafraid to give voice to their emotions on these sites.

"In the period immediately after Independence, Indians refused to speak up about their emotions. Decades later, they became a tearful bunch. Now, we seem to in the verbalising mode," Dr Harish Shetty said.
One of the clearest indicators of this is that it is not only patients who use social media platforms to post selfies or to announce their wedding or change of job. Doctors are doing it as well. "They are human too," said Dr Lakdawala, who wrote on social media about having a near-death experience. "I wanted people to know what I had been through. I wanted support and empathy," said the 35-year-old doctor from Ahmedabad.
There was also another cause for his "opening up" in public. As a psychiatrist trained to get people to "talk about it," he spoke about the reason for his fall —an epileptic seizure — to all his neighbours. "But instead of sympathy, I found them keeping away from me. Some of them said they were confused about what to tell a sick doctor, but I was a bit hurt," he said. He then felt compelled to choose the Facebook route. "Thankfully, I found great support from my friends and colleagues," he told TOI over the phone from Ahmedabad.

Researchers say that social networking sites do have a way with emotions. The recent paper from Cornell University said that an emotional contagion sweeps Facebook. "Emotions can spread contagiously among users of online social networks, both positive and negative," said the researchers in 'Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks' published online this month in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science) Social Science.
The researchers reduced the amount of either positive or negative stories that appeared in the news feed of 689,003 randomly selected Facebook users, and found that the so-called "emotional contagion" effect worked both ways.
"People who had positive content experimentally reduced on their Facebook news feed, for one week, used more negative words in their status updates," said the researchers. When news feed negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred: "Significantly more positive words were used in people's status updates."
Dr Jalpa Bhuta, a psychiatrist from Global Hospital in Parel, said social media is a boon for individuals who are shy and introverts. "The problem begins when people are unable to control their emotions and use the medium to launch attacks on people who may have angered them," she said. She gave the example of the Twitter spat between Indian socialite Sunanda Pushkar and Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar earlier this year. "So much has been said on the social media platforms that it's impossible to retract," she added.