Screens Are Stressing You Out of Your Mind
The Free Press • • health
Key Points:
- In late 18th-century Europe, young men wearing yellow pants signaled the "Werther Effect," inspired by Goethe's novel where the protagonist's despair led to imitation suicides among readers.
- The yellow pants became a symbol of a psychogenic epidemic, a type of social contagion where mental suffering spreads rapidly without a biological cause.
- Such psychogenic epidemics, characterized by widespread behavioral imitation, continue today in different forms, often linked to modern societal influences.
- The article suggests that the contemporary equivalent of the yellow pants phenomenon is the widespread hunched posture caused by addiction to smartphone screens.
