caravaggio
Member
- May 8, 2017
- 151
- 391
Not that I WANT to change your mind, but I wonder: have you ever read a paper about this topic or are you just speculating?I only pointed out Dahmer as an example to say that a blanket "nobody" statement, which seemed to me to be what was implied in the first place, is false. The effect of content on people varies greatly from person to person. I also very specifically said I was not talking about anyone in particular on this site. I have been referring to a very tiny group of people in the world who actually have mental disorders in the vein of things like psychopathy and sociopathy. I have no idea where anyone is getting the idea that I said dark content causes a mental illness. In fact, I said specifically that it does not cause that. (Jeffry Dahmer even says exactly that: claims like "pornography caused it" are only excuses.) What I stated was that it could act as a trigger, potentially influencing someone who already has a mental illness of that type to act on an existing weakness.
I chose the word trigger very intentionally, and the content absolutely can be a trigger. Just like some people have a genetic weakness to become an alcoholic or similar, so some people with dark thoughts can be more predisposed toward psychological influence through content they consume. I also don't believe the content creates a mental disorder, but it absolutely exacerbates it if it already exists.
Anyway, I wasn't saying the dark content shouldn't exist or that anyone who enjoys that is bad in some way. I didn't mean to cause a big off-topic tangent on the thread. I'm obviously not going to change your minds, and you're not going to change mine. So, agree to disagree, I suppose.
Because there is quite the literature about how experiencing "dark fantasies", so to say, vicariously can be quite therapeutical in many ways.
On the other hand if a person wants to experience deviant behaviours in first person because it gets triggered by said content through media we're probably talking about different kinds of problems, not related to the media itself (seeing you mentioned clearly abnormal subjects like serial killers)