Citation

Pearson GS. J. Am. Psychiatr. Nurs. Assoc. 2024; 30(1): 5-6.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2024, American Psychiatric Nurses Association, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/10783903231216706

PMID

38243791

Abstract

The media is filled with an onslaught of violent events and images from across the world. Mass shootings in schools and other public places, and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have dominated medias with distressing immediacy. As of October 2023, there were 5.3 billion internet users worldwide (65.7% of the global population); of this total, 4.95 billion (61.4% of the global population) were social media users (Statista, 2023). Thus, the majority of the world is witnessing these violent events. While social media is generally used for entertainment or pleasure, what happens when it becomes a source of violent, graphic, and immediate acts of national and international violence occurring through mass shootings or armed conflict, for example? This editorial is being written in response to recent national and international events involving violence directed at world populations and looking at the broader result of secondary trauma. Acknowledging that exposure to media violence is not likely to immediately change, this editorial focuses on identifying the effects of media violence and how nurses can manage their own reactions to this while caring for patients, students, supervisees, and family members.

During times of stress, people tend to increase their use of social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, or X, and others (Naranjo-Zolotov et al., 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic marked a time when world populations became even more dependent on media for information during social isolation (Liu & Liu, 2020). These authors identified vicarious trauma that generally occurred as populations dealt with the anxiety from information ambiguity and illness risk (Liu & Liu, 2020). They identified that social media could be a source of secondary trauma during a time of crisis (Liu & Liu, 2020). This has implications around the importance of social media given the immediacy of exposure to violence or distressing information. ...

Language: en