Sabrina Philippe: “We need an education in the virtual world for all”

in collaboration with

Sabrina Philippe (Psychologist)

Doctissimo: How does digital change our behavior and our personalities?

Sabrina Philip: I talk more about virtual than digital in my book. As soon as you take your smartphone, tablet or computer, you connect to this virtual world. It is a continent that is moving away from reality. Every time you connect, you enter this world which has its own way of working. And there is on our part each time an adaptation to this world which does not resemble the real world.

For example, during the pandemic, the photo of a person without a mask could trigger torrents of hatred on social networks. In reality, if you or I had passed this person in the street, we would not have chased him screaming. The virtual world amplifies things and shows them in a different way from the real world. It is also regressive and requires the implementation of an adaptation strategy.

Is this what you call the fake self, a personality in its own right?

Sabrina Philip: It is a virtual coping strategy. In psychology we define the true self, which is the way of expressing oneself in an authentic way and the false self, which is “the comedy”. For example, after a breakup, you arrive at work, you activate the false self: you smile at colleagues, you say hello, you make sure you are well, you don’t go crying in your boss’s office. On the other hand, if you meet a close friend, you can let yourself go and cry, there it is the true self that comes back.

The fake self is the constantly false behavior that we have on social networks for example. To continue on the example of the separation in love, we are going badly but we will post: “What a beautiful day, better to be alone than in bad company!“. It is an adaptation to the suffering felt.

Sabrina Philip: This is the whole subject of the book. It is to become aware of things, to begin to change them. Screens take us away from our interiority and push us to store our anxieties instead of facing them. And the problem with these unmanaged anxieties is that they accumulate.

Today, 40% of young people are confronted with problems of depression or anxiety. You need real awareness by regularly disconnecting from your phone, deactivating notifications…

And for the youngest, I plead for an education in smartphones and the Internet from primary school, that the youngest know how to distinguish the true from the false, to distinguish their emotions to use social networks…

Ditto in companies, training would be useful. We need this virtual world to have warnings for the public, to be framed by labels! We are facing a real problem that unfortunately everyone is unaware of for the moment.