Link: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...-hungry-can-you-go-crazy-from-a-lack-of-touch
Notable quotes: "Satisfying your skin hunger requires you to have meaningful physical contact with another person, and failing to observe your need for human touch can have profound emotional, even physical, consequences."
" "People who are touch hungry usually present as being depressed individuals," Field says. "They're withdrawn; their voice intonation contour is flat." She adds that people suffering from clinical depression may also often suffer from touch hunger—and this can be seen in an area of the brain called the vagus. "When you massage these people, their depression levels go down and their vagal activity goes up." "
" "Physical contact is a requirement of being human," says Kupers. "There's something healing about it. It [touch] is not just correlated with being human—it is being human." "
"Being extremely lonely can amount to a chronic medical condition, and it's one that is more likely to surface in later life as friends and family members die off. One study found that lonely people aged 50 and over were twice as likely to die as their non-lonely peers."
Discussion: Although this article focuses mostly on solitary confinement, lonely elders, modern social media, and the "free hug" movement, it isn't hard to see how this is directly applicable to incels. Incels are also clearly "skin hungry" but as a group were not mentioned even once throughout the article. While undoubtedly the population of people who are imprisoned, elderly, or using social media are much larger than that of people who self-identify with "incel," and therefore the exclusion of incels from this piece is not necessarily prejudicial, it is easy to see the duality of the situation in which Vice and other popular outlets have criminalized incels while being understanding to convicted criminals despite both suffering from the same thing in this case.
The scientists quoted in the article agree that what many incels have to suffer through is basically traumatizing - but connecting those dots in a popular media article happens in few and far between pieces if at all.
Notable quotes: "Satisfying your skin hunger requires you to have meaningful physical contact with another person, and failing to observe your need for human touch can have profound emotional, even physical, consequences."
" "People who are touch hungry usually present as being depressed individuals," Field says. "They're withdrawn; their voice intonation contour is flat." She adds that people suffering from clinical depression may also often suffer from touch hunger—and this can be seen in an area of the brain called the vagus. "When you massage these people, their depression levels go down and their vagal activity goes up." "
" "Physical contact is a requirement of being human," says Kupers. "There's something healing about it. It [touch] is not just correlated with being human—it is being human." "
"Being extremely lonely can amount to a chronic medical condition, and it's one that is more likely to surface in later life as friends and family members die off. One study found that lonely people aged 50 and over were twice as likely to die as their non-lonely peers."
Discussion: Although this article focuses mostly on solitary confinement, lonely elders, modern social media, and the "free hug" movement, it isn't hard to see how this is directly applicable to incels. Incels are also clearly "skin hungry" but as a group were not mentioned even once throughout the article. While undoubtedly the population of people who are imprisoned, elderly, or using social media are much larger than that of people who self-identify with "incel," and therefore the exclusion of incels from this piece is not necessarily prejudicial, it is easy to see the duality of the situation in which Vice and other popular outlets have criminalized incels while being understanding to convicted criminals despite both suffering from the same thing in this case.
The scientists quoted in the article agree that what many incels have to suffer through is basically traumatizing - but connecting those dots in a popular media article happens in few and far between pieces if at all.
