Social Media As Therapy

This essay is mostly about my own usage and experience with social media, and how I have largely benefitted from it over the years, but hopefully there is something universal or at least recognizable for some of the people that might read this.

The social media platform I’ve used the most and for the longest time as of now is Facebook. There were two Norwegian platforms before that that started me off, and I also had Twitter for many years until you-know-who made that platform exclusively a platform for Nazis. I spent many years posting and liking pictures on Instagram before the ads and videos totally overran the place and it became unusable for me. I think I’m too old and set in my ways for TikTok, Reels, video memes in general, it’s just not for me.

I’m having a lot of fun on Bluesky these days, but history shows that it’ll probably become enshittified at some point in the future as well. Will I jump on to a new platform after that? Maybe, probably, but who knows if we’ll even want to use any form of social media five or ten years from now.

I was kind of late to join Facebook, because I was having so much fun on Nettby, one of the Norwegian platforms I alluded to earlier, but it was probably in 2007. Seems odd that that was late now.

Anyway, it was before the News Feed was created and I don’t remember much of the first few years on there, and judging by Memories, not a lot was going on there at all.

I think around 2010, the web forum my online friends lived in was kinda shutting down for good, and we friended each other on Facebook and started interacting on there instead. More internet friends were added from mutuals, and some of my oldest friendships today started and have existed exclusively online. Time is a blur but I’ve known some of these people for the better part of two decades, and we’ve never met, and never will.

That’s all backstory, and not my main point of this essay. What I really want to talk about is the positive effects social media has had on my mental health at times, even when I was struggling really badly. Social media largely has a negative reputation, deservedly so, given the ways the algorithms are set up to make you angry because anger causes more engagement than positive posts, apparently.

Lots has been written about this, and it hasn’t been my personal experience, so I’m not gonna get into that, but people who avoid Facebook are probably better off.

I have schizophrenia, and the way it manifested itself largely to me when it was really bad was major depression and “tankekjør”, a Norwegian word I don’t have a good translation for, but basically my brain would go at 100 miles per hour and it’d get caught up on a certain phrase or word or name or any kind of annoying thing and just repeat it ad nauseam until I did something about it. The best thing to do was to just do a shitpost and post it on Facebook.

The way these phrases or words or names acted was similar to an “earworm,” when you get a song stuck in your head. Imagine the worst song you know stuck in your head for hours at a time, but then posting the lyrics to Facebook would make it go away.

I am so much better off now, healthwise, than I was in my twenties, but I still have this obsession with certain words or phrases that now largely express themselves in crazy headlines about my friend Jean-Marc. This guy is pretty private and I’ve only seen five pictures of him over 15 years or something of friendship. Again, time is a blur so it might be twelve years or ten.

Anyway, when I first got a picture of him, I’d edit him into stupid memes and post them on his wall. And I kept doing this every day for a year, which in retrospect must’ve been annoying as fuck, because I recently spent the better part of 2024 deleting old posts off my own profile, and the posts other people had made on my wall were the most frustrating things to see and delete.

Anyway, after a year of Jean-Marc memes on his wall, I started posting them on my secondary profile instead (oh yeah, I had two profiles for many years, but we’ll get to that later). I must’ve made upwards of five or six hundred Jean-Marc memes before I went swimming with my phone and lost the original pictures.

I started making Jean-Marc posts after this, which are usually outlandish and defamatory posts, usually formatted as a news headline about him, and I’d post several of these a day on the secondary profile. It was a total brainworm, and even today I still make up several Jean-Marc posts per day, although after deleting the Erika profile, I type them out and share them less, although I still post them as comments on mutual friends’ posts sometimes.

As to my mental illness, Jean-Marc posts are probably the biggest, most noteworthy manifestation that still occurs, about five years into being healthy (brain got quiet for whatever reason about the time the pandemic started).

Back in my twenties, which I was largely (what is this, the eightieth time I’ve used that word in this essay so far?) depressed throughout, these brainworms were a far bigger problem and more annoying though. I’d sometimes get a name of a footballer or MMA fighter stuck in there, and I’d repeat the name in my head on and off for days, it was maddening as fuck. And I was mad, in the classical sense.

What I found was that typing the word or phrase or sentence out would make it better, and posting it on Facebook my brain would be quiet for a little while at least. The problem with this was that the most consistent phrase my brain said to me for most of my life was “kill myself”, and while posting that from time to time was very helpful for getting some peace of mind for a little while, friends and family found it upsetting to read. Strange that, no?

No, I get it now, that it probably sucked as hell to see your son, brother, friend, post about killing himself, but for me posting it was a way of preventing the thought from turning into something dangerous. Facebook as therapy.

I know many other posters know this feeling, just from being online. I recognize weird memes and posts that someone had to post to stop from thinking about them anymore, but I don’t think this is a universal experience, because there are many people who do not shitpost, weird as that sounds. I’m not going to define a shitpost by the way, but if you’re reading this you probably know me and you should know that word.

After one too many phone calls from an upset mother wondering what I was posting about the previous night, I decided to make a secondary profile, which was a great idea at the time. On Erika Engberg I could easily post every single thought I ever had without having to think about it for more than a second. Frictionless posting, frictionless therapy. It was wonderful and necessary for several years.

Sometime in 2024, for some reason I don’t remember, but maybe due to the “AI” scam or something related to that, I decided to go through and delete posts I didn’t want to be associated with anymore. I also deleted the Erika profile completely at that point.

Facebook obviously sucks ass and is bad, but I’ve had so much fun on there over the years, and some of my best friends only exist on there, but I have given serious thought to deleting my online friends on there, and as a result seeing only posts from my aunt, uncle and mom, and doing that as a way to stop using Facebook completely. Most people I know in real life don’t use it anymore.

At least they don’t post anything, and that is the weirdest thing I know of. People who are on social media, but don’t post, comment, or even like shit. Just passively reading the posts and mentioning my post when we meet in real life later. I do not understand this usage of the internet. You must have thoughts? You must take pictures and come up with captions? You must enjoy some of the posts you see, so why no like? It is very unsettling to me, but I am a Poster and will probably always be one, even if I post way less now than I did five years ago.

I mostly post on Bluesky now, and my posts, because they are bad, usually get between zero-one likes. Some get more! Which is nice, but not that important to me? Certain posts deserve some love, but I’m sure most of my followers and friends don’t see them, due to how social media works (Bluesky has no algorithm and shows you posts from the people you follow in the order they post them, the way social media used to be, and how it should always be. The other platforms though…).

Not the main point here, but something I’ve found very strange when I look at other people’s Facebook, is that it looks unusable? Because they have ads and suggested posts, and they don’t fight it, so the algo shows them whatever shit a computer “thinks” a human wants to see? I quit Instagram when it got too much of this, even though it was my favorite platform for years.

I know this isn’t a universal experience, because when I mention it to other people they don’t understand, but ever since Facebook introduced sponsored posts, ads, suggested posts, I’ve pressed ‘X’ on every single one of them, clicked “show me less”, and hidden the page from posting for 30 days, told the questionnaire “not interested”, and used the app less when it shows me this stuff, so 99% of the time I’ve spent on Facebook, even to this day in 2025, has been ad and suggested post free. I have no idea if this is possible for other people if they start now, because I have been doing this since Day One, but no way would I use Facebook even half as much if the ads and suggested posts were there all the time.

As mentioned, I quit Instagram last August, because it wasn’t any fun anymore, it was all ads and videos. Actually, come to think of it, I stopped using it because for three days my feed didn’t load, it just said I’d seen every post, and by the time Mark Zuckerberg managed to fix it again I was over it. Haven’t really gone into how Instagram and Facebook, as apps, are just broken and don’t work anymore, because Meta makes giant profits even when, or maybe because, their products don’t work. Shit show of an economy we got here.

Anyway, I started posting a little on Instagram again a couple months ago when I released my short story Four Cats And A Life Improved on Amazon Kindle, to try and promote it. I even made Reels, and Reels have Insights, and the whole thing is so weird. 70-80% of the people who have seen my little videos are people who do not follow me last time I checked, and I find that very strange. I get that that’s how Reels and the algorithm works, but I don’t understand why anyone would want that. No shade though, we all need to do whatever to survive and make it through the day under capitalism, and if mindlessly scrolling through videos is helpful, do it. It’s not for me though.

I deleted 95% of my Facebook posts, the whole Erika profile, Twitter, archived around 1,500 Instagram posts, and deleted 60 of my YouTube videos over the last year. Maybe it’s the beginning of quitting social media altogether, in as far as that is possible in our current society.

I think I’ll end here, writing these little pieces for publication later today or tomorrow is a fun little exercise, and giving it away for free adds less pressure to make it perfect, and it feels nice! I have two essays written for that collection I decided to shelve that I should rework for this blog before I move on to a new writing project, and maybe I’ll do more quick essays like this too! Ciao!