The Psychological Impact of Consuming True Crime

• Read original article here

The Psychological Impact of Consuming True Crime
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .
Close Alert
Oct 5, 2022 3:24 PM
The Psychological Impact of Consuming True Crime
From Serial to Netflix's Jeffrey Dahmer series, it's time to think about what pop culture's fascination with murder cases does to viewers—and victims. 
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .
Courtesy Of Netflix
Save Story
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .
Serial, the hit podcast that birthed modern true crime as we know it, just turned eight years old. In the near-decade that’s come and gone, the genre it begat has become a full-on phenomenon. Podcasts, documentaries, limited series, limited series based on podcasts —it’s infiltrated the public psyche. In a few cases, this influx is positive; some true crime listeners/viewers report they’ve found solace in their favorite grim retellings. But what about everyone else?
Research has shown that consumption of crime news can lead to outsize fears of becoming a victim, and for those who are survivors of violence, the glut of content can be a lot to take. When Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story premiered a couple of weeks ago, it quickly became one of Netflix ’s most popular series ever. It also drew criticism from the victims’ families, who found it retraumatizing to have audiences discussing the case anew.
Child Safety
The Problem With Mental Health Bots
Grace Browne
For Dahmer, the show’s forum of choice seems to be TikTok ; for others, it’s Twitter or Facebook. For the Serial long-haulers, it’s Reddit. On October 5, 2014, two days after the debut episode of that show, fans created r/serialpodcast to discuss the 1999 murder of teenager Hae Min Lee and to debate the culpability of her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed. Today, the sub has 75,000 members. When a judge vacated Syed’s murder conviction in mid-September , many former users returned to the space. Others had never left.
Whether actively dredging up the troubling details of old cases in those spaces is good is debatable. Serial did help vacate Syed’s conviction, and other podcasts and forums have played their own roles in the justice system . On the other hand, citizen sleuths can potentially waste police time . And meanwhile, all that investigating can be taxing on the people doing it.
Ben Coccio left r/serialpodcast eight years ago. The 47-year-old filmmaker from Los Angeles was “engrossed” by Serial. “You want to go and talk to people about it and be there in that moment of mystery with them,” he says. But gradually, the subreddit became polarized. When he began posting about Serial, Coccio was trying to lower his blood pressure without medication, so he monitored it regularly. “I was really hyper-aware of things that made me feel worked up and anxious and manic,” he says. He quickly noticed that arguing with people on the sub was “adding to that.” As the group split into those who thought Syed was innocent and those who thought he was guilty, Coccio would occasionally “lash out” when debating strangers.
“You don’t have anyone else to take it out on; you can’t call the prosecutor in Baltimore,” Coccio says. “I mean I could, but they’re never gonna listen to me. So you just take it out on [the subreddit’s users], because they’re there.”
Most Popular
Give Your Back a Break With Our Favorite Office Chairs
Julian Chokkattu
While Coccio eventually left the subreddit, many others stayed. Dawn Cecil, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida and author of Fear, Justice & Modern True Crime, says that many who engage with true crime forums have “good intentions of wanting to help solve a crime or find a missing person”; some also want to draw attention to miscarriages of justice and question the effectiveness of the criminal justice system.
Still, Cecil warns that true crime forums can become echo chambers that feed fear or buttress preexisting beliefs. Consuming true crime, as she details in her book, can also skew people’s perception of crime and reinforce stereotypes.
It can also lead people to things they regret. Marcus is a 42-year-old from Seattle who joined Reddit purely so he could post on r/serialpodcast. At first he found it “fun,” but in his time there he has been verbally attacked as well as doxed—a stranger from the subreddit once called him at work. (He asked that WIRED not use his real name for privacy purposes.) He says he’s seen “some of the most gruesome things I’ve ever seen on the internet” thanks to his interest in the Serial case.
Meghan, a 30-year-old nurse from Washington who asked that WIRED not use her last name, has spent seven years on the sub out of “habit.” She enjoyed the early “exciting” days when people regularly posted new discoveries and says chatting with strangers over the years has been beneficial. “At this point some of the other long-term posters feel a bit like old friends, even the ones that I fight with the most,” she says. But personal attacks on the sub also heighten Meghan’s anxiety, and she has also come to reevaluate her attitude toward true crime.
“I am embarrassed and ashamed of how gleefully I came back to this sub to look at lividity documents, et cetera, without fully considering that the victim was a real person,” she says. “A teenager died; multiple other teenagers’ lives were completely upended … It’s just all sad. And I think that does affect my mental health.”
Two years ago, Marcus took a step back from r/serialpodcast. “It became really bad for my mental health, arguing the same arguments,” he says. When Syed was released from prison last month, Marcus returned to r/serialpodcast—but he imagines it won’t be for long. Meghan says she will stop consuming Serial commentary if Syed is not tried again . For others, true crime forums remain tantalizing spaces—where community has been forged and answers appear to be just around the corner.
As of this writing, Dahmer is the top English-language show on Netflix, which reports that some 56 million households have seen the series. The streaming service is set to premiere Conversations With a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes on Friday.
More Great WIRED Stories