I feel like every day there’s a new piece on selfies. One article claimed you could get lice from selfies, while another post accumulated a number of selfies at funerals. Now, there is even a song titled “#SELFIE.” But these photos are more than quick self-portraits. These innocent pictures can also have major effects on a person’s well-being, evident in the expanding realm of trauma selfies. “Like the Funeral Selfie before it, the Hospital Selfie exposes a massive generational divide about the etiquette of self-expression and oversharing, especially in the face of disaster.”
If you search #amputee on Instagram, you’ll see a slew of photos of amputee patients, many of them selfies. There are similar hashtags too, like #amputeelife, #amputeeproblems and even #amputeeswag. All of these categories are filled with selfies of patients, and most of them have suffered major trauma.
“The more I repeat it the less real it becomes. The idea of sharing trauma, at least for me, is not so much to elicit anything back but just to get it out of me.”
Like the woman who live-tweeted the birth of her child, these posts have been met with criticism, but the cancer patients, amputees and other trauma victims don’t mind. They’re not using social media just to put their story out there. Instead, they’re using it to connect with people in the same situation. I may follow someone on Instagram based on a shared clothing style, just like they may connect with someone if they are both working though cancer treatments.
“When I was on Instagram, I would click on different hashtags of #brainsurgery or #craniotomy and see so many other people’s pictures of their scars. It was so cool. Just typing in a Google search on the Internet, that’s kind of what I was looking for. I was looking for affirmation from somebody else.”
The selfies are graphic, but they’re helping patients cope with their situations. In a way, it might even be helping them heal.
“With medical stuff, people don’t know how to talk about it and don’t know how to start the conversation. Putting it out there [on social media] really helps. It’s really hard to, but it really helps.”