Pictures of Food on Facebook – A Sign of Serious Mental Illness?
Do you take photographs of your evening meal? Do you prepare a nice dinner and then post photographs of that meal on social media websites –primarily Facebook?
Do you do the same thing with food put before you in restaurants?
A lot of people do this regularly, and according to researchers in Denmark, there seems to be a connection between the incidence of serious mental illness and the mental health of the average person who posts pictures of their food on Facebook.
Psychiatric Fellowship Research Denmark, a group of seventy-three doctors of psychiatry in residence at hospitals throughout Denmark and Luxembourg, has published the results of a 3-year study into amateur photography in social media and the meaning behind various photographs submitted to Facebook by its millions of members.
It might seem totally normal to be proud of the cake you baked or the delicious platter of pasta and meatballs that you’ve put before you at the dining table, but the sad truth is that people who frequently put pictures of their food onto their Facebook pages are either very lonely or unable to interact socially with mentally stable people.
Most people who post photos of food might find this hard to believe. They might think they’re just great cooks, but according to Dr. Helen LaVista MD PhD, the chief Resident in the psychiatric fellowship, ordinary folks who posts photos of Food on Facebook are more apt to be suffering from serious subconscious issues and their overall mental health might be in jeopardy. In fact, many of these people might already have serious issues about which they are unaware.
Here’s what Dr. Helen LaVista had to say about the study which will be released publicly after the results are tabulated and confirmed one last time in late July 2013 by an independent auditor in Switzerland.
“We studied nearly 7,000 Facebook accounts over a 36-month period, and then we followed up with a carefully prepared questionnaire that was sent to all of those who participated in the study. The results were shocking.
“Not only did the participants in our study score well below average on standardized IQ tests, nearly 88% showed an inclination to having or having had certain psychological issues — chief among them being a form of narcissistic delusional paranoia. After more in depth research, we found that 76% of that subgroup were or were once under psychiatric care for mental illness. One can conduct psychological studies for a lifetime and not see one study where the results are as conclusive as the results we have compiled.
“Sadly, when the results of this study are released, the headlines in the Western World will scream that ‘People Who Put Pictures of Food on Facebook are Mentally Sick’ and while that headline will be essentially true, that is not what we would like to see. There are a small percentage of people posting photos of food who are not mentally sick. The exceptions to the rule are people who are intellectually ill-equipped to process any kind of complicated social interaction. There is an even smaller percent who post pictures of food because food crafting is their profession, and in those cases, the analysis is moot.”
Dr. Helen LaVista, her son Anthony LaVista MD PhD, and their team throughout Europe have analyzed and re-analyzed every ounce of data they have accumulated and despite various attempts to retool the tests or analyze the data from a different viewpoint, the results were the same.
“We sent messages to people on Facebook throughout Europe, Australia, North America and Japan, and we asked for their participation. This gave us access to their Facebook accounts in that our group befriended them on Facebook disguised as a casual friend. All people involved in the test had no idea that this had anything to do with photos of food, but from a group of nearly 10,000 participants, we culled 6,885 who had at least once posted photos of their food. This was a very painstaking process but in seven months we had our core base of people to study.
“We sent each of these participants an online questionnaire that was rewarded with a gift card to the store or charity of their choice,” said Dr. Anthony LaVista.
“Of the 6,885, we had a complete response rate of 6,120. In other words, a lot of people followed through. All of those who responded completed a standard IQ test and a personality screening test. The results of those tests brought us to a sub-group of 547 people who shared four of five common links with the entire group; low intellectual capacity, a history of depression, anxiety, previous treatment for mental illness and academic underachievement.
“We used a tried and true testing model and the final results tells us that nearly 90% of people who post pictures of food on Facebook, are suffering from some form of mental illness. The worst afflicted are the Narcissistic Delusional Paranoids who take picture of food as a way to draw attention to themselves by using a primitive instinct to display food. which may have been useful for primitive homosapiens.
“In wild animals this is ordinary behavior for primates, wolves and felines, but as you travel downwards in the animal kingdom, the less intelligent animals prefer to hide their food. Again, the lower, almost primitive intellect of those tested, is testament as to why this rare condition was found to be prevalent among people who post photos of their food on Facebook.
“These individuals have a high incidence of being unable to establish any meaningful relationships or friendships because they live in a delusional state of superiority. They have alpha personalities but are intellectually limited. The nature of their illness was made even more noticeable to the untrained eye by the fact that many of those afflicted dined alone. In other words, their photos were photos of a single plate with no signs of other people in the photo. In other words, these people take these photos alone. No psychiatrist will go so far as to say that a lone photo of a dinner plate filled with food is ample proof of a delusional state, but the results of the test are indisputable at this point. The closest variant of animal behavior to which we can compare this would be found among wolves and wild dogs.
“Many of the others who fell into some kind of sub group had a history of treatment for various psychiatric illnesses. One of the participants stated that he was, ‘just lonely.’ but a closer look showed us that the loneliness was rooted in social withdrawal both by the person in question and by the people around him. In other words, the loneliness is not a symptom of the mental illness, it is the result of the ripple effect this personality disorder has on the human environment of the individual.”
So, this might sound rude and mean and unscientific, but TheDamienZone likes to point out the obvious and in this case, the obvious is the fact that people who take photos of food and put those photos on Facebook are not only intellectually impaired, they have a pretty good chance of being mentally sick too.
This comes as no shock to restaurateurs in New York, Chicago, London, and Los Angeles where chefs are forbidding patrons from taking photographs of their food because many of these photo-snapping patrons, according to Dr. Helen LaVista, are often disruptive and troublesome. Currently, the City Council if New York is trying to put this “no Food Photos” edict into law.
