Self Disclosure
- Mar 8, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 11, 2022
While some may argue it shouldn't fall upon the disabled to promote activism, others find solace and empowerment in constructing expertise and credibility through personal experience.
"Thank you for watching this. Sorry if it was TMI to put on the Internet. [...] This is your sign to go get help if you feel like shit all the time. [...] I just accepted that I would feel like shit all the time and now I don't feel like shit all the time. [...] It's a nice thing. So don't just accept that. [...] Don't suffer because you think you have to, because you don't." - Sophie Marlo, 2021
19 year old college student Sophie Marlo shares her month-long experience taking ADHD medication for the first time. She claims to not know why she feels the need to document her journey and even explains her fear of sharing too much information.
And yet she shares her story nonetheless.
She has since posted an updated journey vlog in February of 2022 after thankful viewers encouraged her to share more.
While it's impossible to know all of Sophie's or any other mental health vlogger's true intentions, research suggests discovery and construction of personal identity to be a potential affect, especially within the invisible disability community where self expression seeks to create appropriate representation where mass media sensationalizes, romanticizes, or fails to represent invisible disability at all. Setting up a video camera, photo light, or microphone for free form expression is not only validating, but also liberating for an individual seeking to normalize themselves in the face of misrepresentation.
"People with ADHD play life on hard mode. We can do hard things, but we don't have to do them in the hardest way possible."
Jessica McCabe is a lifestyle YouTuber "working on spreading awareness for ADHD as well as providing ADHD-friendly tools that can make life with it less challenging, more awesome." In addition to offering helpful tools, tips and advice to her neurodivergent audience, she dedicates portions of her videos toward educating her neurotypical viewers in how to best support their neurodivergent partners. While the information she shares is always based in scientific research and presented in a professional, more structured setting compared to Sophie's vlogs, Jessica still maintains personal flair by sitting directly in front of the camera and speaking to it as if to be speaking directly to the viewer themselves.
In the last decade, YouTube has become a central hub of social interaction, “providing a platform for everyday expression, vernacular creativity, and community formation." YouTube mediates the formation of social networks and provides not only an outlet for creative expression, but also a community for like-minded individuals to congregate, learn, teach, and engage. While raising online awareness is not an uncommon practice, lifestyle video blogging and documentation like the above productions acts as "a spoken, asynchronous form of computer-mediated communication...." In other words, despite the absence of immediate reactions from an immediate audience, through open ended speech patterns, gestures and visual composition, the vlogger encourages conversation to which the audience is then invited to respond to in kind as if the conversation were, indeed, two-way.
Connection. Interaction. Conversation.
For creator and viewer alike, the person on the other side of the camera is someone we can relate to, someone we can speak to, and, most importantly, someone we can trust, and in a world of rapidly moving uncertainty, exchanging shared experiences through vlogging helps to maintain not only control of our environment, but also our mental health.
Sources:
Burgess, Jean & Joshua Green. 2018 [2009]. YouTube: Online video and participatory culture, 2nd edn. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0066
Frobenius, M. (2014). Audience design in monologues: How vloggers involve their viewers. Journal of Pragmatics, 72, 59–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.02.008
Raun, T. (2012). DIY Therapy: Exploring Affective Self-Representations in Trans Video Blogs on YouTube. Digital Cultures and the Politics of Emotion, 165–180. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230391345_10
Sokół, M. (2022). “Together we can all make little steps towards a better world”: interdiscursive construction of ecologically engaged voices in YouTube vlogs. Text & Talk, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0089
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