Teenage girls with “invisible illnesses” are posting distressing videos of themselves online as part of a new community called “Spoonies,” which receives thousands of likes.
As a result of the movement, which also encourages teens to mislead medical professionals in order to get the desired diagnosis, thousands of teenagers are uniting online.
In some cases, posting videos of oneself sobbing or lying motionless in a hospital bed garners hundreds of thousands of likes, with dozens of comments endorsing the “spoon theory.”
Although functional disease is a real and ongoing issue, experts claim that it is frequently not the one that teenagers “think they have.”
“It’s generated by anxiety in most cases, or another comorbidity, and then spread by the ease of TikTok,” said Dr. Katie Kompoliti, a neurologist at Rush University Medical Center, to Commonsense News.
The term “Spoonie” was created in 2003 by a blogger who claimed that a spoon represents energy and gave their “Spoon Theory” a moniker.
People who are ill, known as spoonies, only have a limited number of spoons and must be “strategic” with how they use them, frequently by performing daily tasks. Healthy people have an infinite number of spoons.
MS, Crohn’s disease, endometriosis, and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome are some of the more uncommon and difficult-to-diagnose diseases that some spoonies experience (POTS).
Others struggle with ‘functional disorders,’ which can only be diagnosed by a series of medical tests and have no physical cause.
In order to offer people a “insight” into what life is like with their conditions, many of the women who use the app complain about being neglected or incorrectly diagnosed by physicians. They often reveal their most vulnerable moments.
Some people assert that they have been the victims of “medical gaslighting,” which includes being told by a doctor to lose weight in order to improve their condition.
Some of them utilise their platforms, some of which have hundreds of thousands of followers, to advertise offers for eyeglasses or nutritional supplements in order to make money.
A psychiatrist at the University of Washington Medical Center named Dr. Mark Sullivan worries that the internet has produced “communities of grievance” that have influenced patients to adopt “victim mentalities.”
One woman complained on social media that her psychiatrist had advised her to lose weight in order to “feel better” and that she felt “in shambles” as a result.
One of the group members even offered to send the doctor an anonymous email to explain the harms of claiming that someone’s weight was the root of their mental or physical problems as the group came together in support.
In the community, Morgan Cooper felt “less alone,” and she was later given a diagnosis of median arcuate ligament syndrome.
She said to Commonsense: “I just uploaded a video called “I’m Sick,” and the thumbnail showed me sobbing.
Every time I posted a picture of myself on Instagram, it would receive around 2,000 likes, whether it was of me looking dejected, holding pills, or in a wheelchair.
Cooper even joined the Snapchat group “Sick B****s,” where members would chat about the bad things happening in their lives.
To make her own situation appear worse on social media, she claims she felt the need to bulk up her own pills with supplements. She also acknowledged feeling ‘jealous’ of a girl who appeared to be more ‘ill’ than her.
She was promoting salt tablets, which can help with the dizziness caused by POTS, when she was following one of the girls.
Probiotic-filled snack bars with the catchphrase “Hot Girls Have IBS” were used by some others to cash in on brand partnerships.
To concentrate on recovering from fibromyalgia and later Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, Marybeth Marshal, 27, of St. Petersburg, Florida, left college.
You might get dependent on being depressed, ill, and the attention you receive, she warned. The adage “misery loves company” makes you feel worse.
“There might be something you’re gaining from this diagnosis, like it’s keeping you from a job you hate, or from responsibilities that you don’t want to do,” the doctor said.