The Digital Age: Youth, Disability, and Mental Health

Abstract

Drawing on 15 semi-structured interviews with Aotearoa youth, all of whom actively discuss disability and/or mental health online, alongside textual analysis of a variety of posts collected through approximately 100 hours of observation among 15 online community groups and tag searches across the social media platforms Facebook, Reddit and Instagram, I investigate how these New Zealanders engage in and with digital space. A core argument of this thesis is that social media forums and communities provide youth with a place to create a sense of solidarity in a society dominated by ableist assumptions. However, these spaces are also constructed and encoded with these ableist assumptions. As a member of the disabled community examining these issues and what it means to consider mental illness to be a “chronic disease” – or disability – of youth (McGorry et al., 2007:S5) were incredibly interesting. Digital technologies and social media provide spaces for the hidden histories of socially marginalised groups, such as the disabled and mentally ill, to be given their own voices. In this thesis, I investigate how some disabled and mentally ill youth in Aotearoa use the freedoms, information-sharing capacities, and community features of digital and social media (such as memes, photos, and YouTube content) in their communications of their experiences and perspectives. Language, as a social practice, plays a critical political and social role in how disabilities and mental health are understood in Aotearoa and, therefore, how disabled and mentally ill youth communicate on social media. These explorations lead to understandings of the relationship between voice and the activist, something which is non-linear and temporally situated. Activism and the activist are influenced by social norms, often being placed as the Other, leading to temporal retreats from activist activity. Social media provides a space and opportunity for disabled and mentally ill youth to reclaim their autonomy and their voice, which in traditional ableist spaces have been taken from them. Additionally, the Covid-19 pandemic has illustrated our digital technologies of care. The dual use of online groups for social support and information-seeking demonstrate how these social media platforms can perform as what Long (2020:250) calls “vital technologies of care” through which users possess the capacity to sustain relationships and wellbeing. They also demonstrate what I have termed “long social Covid” – the shared sense of social consciousness that reflects the social impacts of Covid-19. I suggest that digital communication, by enabling autonomy, voice, and validation, provides vital spaces for intra-group support that can develop into acts of broader social activism. However, social activism is temporally sensitive, an activity which people can and do move in and out of according to their capacities, needs, and ability to engage in activism; the retention of their voice is not dependent on their participation in social activism.