Public Health Officials Warn Not To Read Online Comments

Online comments account for an increasing share of mental health incidents, according to Central Bureau of Statistics data.

Jerusalem, January 18 – Heads of various healthcare organizations and public health administrators called on Israelis today not to endanger themselves through exposure to comments on web-based articles or videos.

High-ranking officials at the Ministry of Health, the National Insurance Institute, and the country’s leading sick funds issued a joint statement urging people not to read such comments, even if they appear below an otherwise harmless article. Exposure to such harmful input, they warned, has been implicated in accelerated loss of brain cells, in high blood pressure, in stress-related nervous disorders, and in social dysfunction.

“We urge everyone to disable comments if at all possible,” read the statement. “This applies equally to YouTube and to reputable news or analysis sites, but has proven especially insidious on sites where Facebook-based comments also appear. Please avoid looking at comments, and if you are a person who submits comments, we urge you to stop at once, and to seek appropriate psychiatric care.”

“Seriously, WTF would possess a person to engage in behavior that can only harm others?” continued the statement. “Are you a total sociopath?”

Online comments account for an increasing share of mental health incidents, according to Central Bureau of Statistics data. In 2014, the earliest year such information was tracked, online comments accounted for only 8% of cases in which physical or emotional trauma occurred. By 2015, that figure had soared to 26%, and preliminary data for 2016 indicates that close to 30% of mental health incidents in Israel can be traced to at least one encounter with comments.

The most common venues for harm-inducing comments include YouTube, Ynet, and Facebook. In the case of Facebook, the lion’s share of harm appears to originate from Pages devoted to the promotion of conspiracy theories such as chemtrails. On YouTube, according to Bureau reports, seizure-inducing comment threads populate the site more evenly, with the harm accruing almost equally from monumental stupidity and malignant ideology.

Across all websites, the experts warned, the proliferation of celebrity-worship already poses dangers, but the comments cross all thresholds of safety. Clinical psychologists praised the statement, but many wondered whether it was too late to prevent massive damage. “It is clear that many of the monsters submitting online comments were themselves exposed to comments before,” lamented Dr. Favstar Nickelbach. “Had mental health professionals taken steps earlier, the cycle of harm might have been averted. I wonder how many poor souls could have been spared suffering if the government itself had adopted measures to prevent this scourge from infecting our society in the first place.”

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