Sex, Lies & DM Slides - S1E8: Gizzi & Sydney | How Grindr may affect mental health

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

Sydney and Gizzi invite on Dr Jack Turban, a resident physician in psychiatry at The Massachusetts General Hospital and a clinical fellow in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He discusses his research into the mental health impacts of apps like Grindr - which makes for a shocking listen.  Sex, Lies and DM Slides is a Spotify Original. This series was produced by Heydon Prowse Productions, edited by Podmonkey with music by Free Seed Films. For Spotify, the executive producers are Rachel Simpson and Alexandra Adey.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, my name's Gizzy Erskine. And I'm Sydney Lima, and this is Sex, Lies and DM Slides. Where we invite our celebrity friends to dive deep into their DM boxes to see what terrors lurk within. We'll be chatting about online trolls, online dating, perverted proposals and why everyone's so weird on social media. Sex and Lies and DM Slides. This podcast contains adult content, graphic details about sex lives,

and the filthy contents of our inboxes. You have been warned. Hello, I'm Gizzy Erskine. And I'm Sydney Lima. And you're back for our Spotify original podcast, Sex Lies and DM Slides, where we chat. I'm going back to university for $0 delivery fee, up to 5% off orders, and 5% Uber cash back on rides.

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We're speaking to Dr Jack Turban, who is a clinical fellow in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. And Gizzy and I came across an article he wrote, which researches the mental health implications of Grindr. I think it was particularly interesting, as there are a lot of similarities with all social media apps, particularly with the addictive nature. One of the reasons we started this podcast

was because people were sliding into our DMs and being hugely inappropriate. And this discussion leads on to talking about sexual assault through Grindr. And one of the things which we're sort of noticing more and more is how people are utilising social media in a very abusive way. And just because you're able to sort of stand behind your, you know, your laptop, your phone or whatever, it sort of like changes culpability slightly. And he had so many horrific stories. I think it's interesting as well that UK psychiatrists have called on social media companies to hand over their data to mental health researchers in a bid to understand the risks that these apps have for children

particularly especially with like grinder and stuff i mean you can pretend you're over the age of 18 and sign up to a lot of these kind of apps i mean a lot of people get a bit weird about their kids having instagram because you know you're exposed to people sliding into your dms and sending kind of abusive pics from like you can send it to anyone. But also with these dating apps, I mean, I think it has a similar risk. Even maybe arguably a more complicated one, because I guess if you're a young person growing up within the LGBT community, probably a bit confused. And this is your first exposure to a dating site. It must be a complete, for lack of a better word head fuck you know and sort of if this is now your new dialogue of how you interact with sex it's yeah suddenly becomes super complicated i don't

know if you saw um i may destroy you i did on your recommendation i've got what i've i did it i've been trying to make her watch this bloody thing for so long no i got up to the end of episode four okay that's great i blitzed it in one night and I'm going to go back to it. It's bloody amazing. It's great. And, you know, there's one scene in that really traumatic scene with gay sex and growing up. You know, and I just think, you know, this is something that we really need to talk about, not just within gay culture, but within all culture.

So here we welcome Dr. Jack Turban. Sex and lies and DMs lies. Jack, your study makes for some worrying reading. Can you give us a rundown of what it entailed? Yeah, so I wrote a Vox piece recently. I wouldn't quite call it research, but it was the first effort for us to better understand what's going on with Grindr and gay men's mental health. And so the backstory for it was, do y'all know many people who use Grindr? Yeah, I mean, I was first introduced to it through friends. Boy, George actually introduced me to

Grindr. So yeah, it's been around for a while. And I don't know if you noticed the same thing that I noticed. But I noticed I'd be out to dinner with friends and they would constantly be on their phone and I'd be trying to tell them about my day. They'd be ignoring me. And then I would hear the kind of the classic grinder sound. And I realized people could not get off the app. And one day I went up to my friend who was on it all the time. And in psychiatry, we have something called CAGE questions. It's a screening for people who have alcohol problems and it's an acronym. So the C is for, do you try to cut back on your alcohol? So I asked him, do you ever try and cut back on your grinder use and find that you can't really? And he was like, oh my God, yeah, I can't stop using it. A is do you get

annoyed when people ask about it? And he was like, yeah, I'm getting irritable that you're bothering me about this. G is if you feel guilty about it. And he was like, yeah, I'm pretty ashamed that I can't stop using it. And then E is for eye opener. That's a word for when you have a drink first thing in the morning. It's one of the signs that you have a more serious alcohol use disorder. And I was staying in his apartment and the next morning when he was making coffee, I noticed he was on the app. So it really got me thinking that, is there something about this app

that may be addictive in some way? And I had done some research in the past studying veterans who get deployed and come back and develop sex addictions. So I was interested in the question broadly. And so the first thing I did was just to write this Vox article to kind of go out, get on Grindr and figure out what people think. So I made a Grindr profile saying that I was a psychiatrist and a journalist looking to talk to people about how they think Grindr has affected their mental health. And I got a ton of messages. So some of them were propositions for sex, but many of them were not. And people really opened up to me about how Grindr was affecting their functioning and their mental health. And two main things came out of it. So one is that people pointed out that sex feels really great, not surprisingly. They talked about

how when they're on the app, they never know when they're going to get sexual excitation or sex. You might go on and have a hookup immediately, or you may be on there for hours, and then surprise, someone is interested. And it turns out that that pattern of getting rewards is why people think slot machines are addictive. And it's called intermittent ratio reward reinforcement, which sounds very fancy,

but all it means is that your rewards for doing something come at unpredictable intervals. And we know that when the rewards come at unpredictable intervals like that, it's really hard to stop the behavior. And that's why we think slot machines are addictive. And gambling addiction, interestingly, was the first behavioral addiction. So an addiction that doesn't require some kind of drug, to make it into the DSM, our official book of psychiatric disorders. It does still actually affect your serotonin levels and dopamine levels, doesn't it? Definitely. And when you put someone in an fMRI scanner, and you give them street drugs, their brain lights up pretty much the same way as when people have

put people in the scanner and have them had orgasms. So it seems that the brain activation you're getting from sex or from drugs are pretty similar. And then on top of that, it has this pattern of reinforcement, like a slot machine, where it's really hard to stop the behavior once you start getting those rewards. So I think at one point I said Grindr is kind of like a slot machine for orgasms. And how could you not expect that that would really pull people in and make it hard for them to stop that behavior? How long can people spend on these apps? And how does that compare to heterosexual dating apps? Yeah, so we have not compared the amount of time that people use between LGBT people and non-LGBT people. I will say we did a study recently that's not published yet, but it does show that younger people,

men, and non-heterosexual people are more likely to use the apps, but we don't know if they, the hours. But the one person I talked to for the Sox article said he was on it for up to 10 hours a day. I think I'll have a good battery life like that, don't you? But the one person I talked to for the Socks article said he was on it for up to 10 hours a day. Has he, huh? You've got to have a good battery life like that, don't you? He has to intermittently plug in the phone because it drains your battery. But that kind of brings in the other theory because that's more what was happening with this person who I talked to, where he grew up in the family that really did not accept him for being gay. He always thought being gay was shameful and that he wasn't deserving of love

and really internalized a lot of those horrible ideas about being gay. Well, there's like a huge community part of it as well, isn't there? You know, you're suddenly you can be anywhere in the world and suddenly feel like you're fitting in. So despite the sort of addiction side as the world's population grows so does the need for resources like potash to support sustainable food production this is why bhp is building one of the world's most sustainable potash mines in canada essential resources responsibly produced this is what BHP has committed to Canada. The future is clear. It's happening now at BHP, a future resources company. To discover how, visit bhp.com slash better future.

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Yeah! Save big on electronics, fashion, and more this Prime Big Deal Days, October 8th and 9th. There's actually a part of it where people go and feel at ease and in comfort, right? Exactly. And definitely not everyone I talked to said that Grindr was bad for their mental health. So people said they formed community on it. Some people messaged me to say that they found their partner or their husband on it.

But the 10 hour a day gentleman had a different experience. So his was that he would feel really bad about himself, feeling sad, depressed, low self-esteem. So he would go on Grindr to try and feel better. He would kind of get some affirmation for being gay, right? Everyone there is gay. It feels like the stresses of being judged for being gay are gone. He's getting some positive comments from men about his body, which makes him feel like his self-esteem is getting a little bit better. And then he would find someone to have sex with. But the thing about Grindr is it's really designed for sex, not those kind of deeper,

intimate relationships that people are often looking for and so the person would have sex and leave and then the person would feel bad about himself for having casual sex and then all those feelings would come back and then he would be right back on Grindr trying to get rid of those negative feelings again and it turned into kind of this vicious loop. So I didn't know that the way that you filter who you're looking for on Grindr is by body type and preference and sexual position. Yeah, exactly. So if you look at the platform, you can see that it's definitely designed for sex and probably not so designed for forming long term dating relationships. Has that always been the case then, even from back in the beginning?

Or is that something like with Tinder, how it sort of evolved? That's always been the case for the design of Grindr. So you can filter by top, bottom or versatile. You can filter by HIV status. You can filter by whether or not you want people to send you naked pictures immediately. When you had your profile, what did you receive from the people trying to hook up with you? Did you receive any images? I did receive some images that likely are not radio appropriate.

I think you'll find they are on this. Bad luck. Definitely on the right show for that. My profile said, like, I'm a doctor and a journalist looking to talk about mental health, but I still got my fair share of the dick pics. What should apps like Grindr be doing to safeguard its users? I've been very critical of Grindr. I think it's great that it creates this space where gay people can connect in a safe environment,

since for a lot of people, it's not safe to do that out in the world. But I think one of the most alarming things is that they don't do much to keep minors off the platform. So I wrote a New York Times article about this last year, that one in four gay and bisexual teenage boys are on Grindr. 69% of them have had sex with someone on the app and only 25% of them have used condoms when they're having that sex. Another big problem with Grindr is this really body focused problem where it kind of promotes the idea that everybody should have 0% body fat and be very muscular. There's a lot of racism on Grindr also. How does that show itself? Pretty explicitly. So some profiles will say like, no fats, no femmes, no Asians is a common phrase that's really taken

off in the media just by how overtly awful it is. And Grindr did start an initiative, they called it Kinder, which was very sweet, where they were sending videos and content to users on the app to try and fight things like transphobia, try to fight some of the criticisms people were making towards people who were more effeminate, and also to try and fight some of the racism time will tell how effective those will be do you think it sort of perpetuated the myth of gay culture i don't know i'm a bit older and you know i'm 40 years old back in the day in london it was always i suppose the grinder equivalent would have been going to the gay saunas you know and things like that do you feel like this is almost like perpetuating it and making that situation even worse, a way to utilize gay culture to its maximum, I don't know, I'd like to say strength. Strength's not the right word. Yeah, I think it's similar. I did at one

point call Grindr kind of the digital bathhouse that's open 24-7 in your living room. And I think it's similar dynamics at play. But I think it's important as much as I say a lot of negative things about Grindr and how it can be harmful is I think both the bathhouse and Grindr had good things and bad things. So it was good in that it gave a place for LGBT people to meet each other and feel affirmed and start to build community and feel like less alone, like they're the only gay people around. The downside is that they've really been sexualized environments that focus on that. And again, there's nothing wrong with kind of sexual liberation and exploring your sexuality or having a lot of sex even. But I think the problem is when the community has so much available for sex and not enough available for these other aspects of mental health, like forming relationships,

learning to affirm yourself, developing a sense of yourself in many domains. I know one 21-year-old who I talked to on the app said that the way he dates now is his first date will be having anonymous sex at two in the morning. And then if he really likes the person, maybe they'll have sex at 11 the next time. And then if that goes well, then maybe they would have drinks at 6 p.m. It's like the most backwards dating. Yeah, they reversed it. But he said because of that, he really thinks of himself in relationships first and foremost as like a sexual being. And he has confidence in being a sexual partner.

But he's really had trouble developing a sense of himself as a romantic, intimate partner outside of sex. I was going to ask, how intrinsic is Grindr to the rise in chemsex parties? Yeah. So Grindr gets flack for everything. So there was also an article looking at meth being sold on Grindr. And so there are all kinds of little ways that people try to say on Grindr that they're selling meth. So they'll capitalize random T's to stand for Tina, which means meth. They'll put little crystal emojis and things like that. But it hasn't been a way that these drugs are entering the gay community more and more.

And also, interestingly, mental health has not paid a lot of attention to hookup apps for straight people or gay people. That's a place where I'm hoping we'll really have more research in the next few years as people start to realize more what a huge impact these social media platforms have had on our mental health and the way we interact with the world and people and think about ourselves and also treatment for people who feel like their

hookup use is really out of control. Where are we with treatment? What's on offer anywhere? Yeah, we're not very far. There is, before people started thinking about hookup app use facilitating problematic sex, if you will, there was research on sex addiction broadly. And it's a controversial field, sex addiction. A lot of people don't think of it as a real diagnosis. It did recently make it into the WHO's ICD-11. That's a list of official mental health diagnoses. So they call it compulsive sexual behavior disorder. So I think people are starting to recognize more that it is a real thing. Social media addiction, also very controversial.

Is that seen in its own right, social media addiction? It is, yeah. A lot of people have theorized that you can get addicted to Twitter or Instagram, etc. But it's another very controversial area where people don't agree on if that's a real addiction, if you will. Tinder can be quite a dark place, but there's even darker places on the Internet. You know, places like Pure. What's Pure? Pure.

I mean, I suppose it's like a straight version of, you know, you can find a hookup within within i think it's like 20 yards of where you are and it is entirely for sex you know there is no shadow of a doubt and you literally you know you don't even have to converse it's like right i'm there is there anything that's even more extreme the grinder out there yet yes uh well grinder is pretty similar to what you were just describing actually yeah but there are um i mean in the u.s there was craigslist casual encounters for a long time that i believe was shut down but it was a website where people would be very explicit about what type of threesome or kinky sex they were looking for there are gay specific ones what do they call it like a manhunt is one cleverly named one another one i believe is called adam for adam so yes those are out there and those have no research

on them. They're very, very little. But back to the question about what we can use for treatment is there is some literature on people who have this sex addiction broadly, whether it's facilitated through social media or apps or whether they just have it. And there have been some medication trials. So people have tried the SSRI citalopram in a small trial of gay men who had sex addiction and that seemed to work. It was a small trial, though. It probably works because most SSRIs just kill your sex drive. That's a side effect of SSRIs. But it could also be that it treats their anxiety and depression that they're trying to self-soothe with the sex.

There's another medication called naltrexone that's used for alcohol use disorder often that people have tried for sex addiction. For really extreme cases, there are hormonal implants or hormone shots that shut down your testosterone and completely kill your sex drive. God. So it's complete withdrawal from sex. One extreme to the other yeah not used commonly it is one of the most extreme treatments some people do feel though that their sex is so out of control and ruining their lives that they're going to go to prison because of it or they're going to lose their job or they're going to lose their family that i have had some patients who said listen i don't don't care. Like these other things in my life are way more important than sex. Just please have the sex go away.

But probably what's most important is getting in some kind of psychotherapy because there's so many reasons that people's grinder use may becoming problematic. So are you self-soothing anxiety? Are you addicted to just the rush of the sex? Have you lost interest in your monogamous relationship for some reason? Maybe that has to do with the models of relationships you saw as a child and you need to work through something like that. Are you afraid that you can't attain love and you think you're not lovable? So you're settling for the hookups. Did your parents tell you that being gay is wrong? think you're not lovable so you're settling for the hookups did your parents

tell you that being gay is wrong so you're searching for acceptance somewhere else to fill that void there are just so many different things that could be at play that it's the best i think is to have a great psychologist or psychiatrist or therapist who can work in all your individual circumstances and dynamics that may be driving it. Oh, I think that might be all we have time for today. Thank you so much for coming on, Jack. It's been a lot. It's been really insightful.

And it's also like not just interesting to hear what you've got to say, but sort of understanding that I do feel like this is the remit of what's going on internationally. I'm going to be following what you're doing actually from now on. It's really very impressive. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

So if anybody has any issues with their mental health or any of the things we've spoken about in this podcast, please contact the Samaritans. Their number is 116 123. Thank you for listening to our Spotify original podcast, Sex, Lies and DM Slides Please follow us on Spotify and tell all your mates about it if you enjoyed it

And if you have any weird and wonderful Sex Lies and DM Slides stories of your own, do slide into our DMs at Sydney Lima and at Gizzy Erskine. No dick pics please Also follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Sex Lies DM Slides This Spotify original podcast is a Hayden Prowse production produced by Amanda Redman,

edited by Matt and Scott at Podmonkey. With music by 3C Films, our executive producers at Spotify are Rachel Simpson and Alexandra Adie.