Psychiatrist Compares Bieber Fever to Terrorism

When pictures of Justin Bieber kissing rumored girlfriend Selena Gomez emerged online, some of his fans, the Beliebers, went on a rampage. Child psychiatrist, Dr. Alan Ravitz, senior director of forensic psychiatry at the Child Mind Institute, says for PopEater that Bieber Fever can easily be compared to terrorism.

There will always be something like Bieber, Dr. Ravitz says, because there have been – and will always be – personalities that can move millions of people in a certain way, setting new trends and creating media frenzy.

With Bieber, the issue is that new media (Facebook and Twitter, most specifically) allows him to create a false sense of intimacy with his fans, which, in turn, prompts some of his fans, who already have some underlining issues, to react a certain way.

Like, for example, to resort to death threats on online forums simply because they’re personally displeased with Bieber’s choice of a girlfriend, as it happened with Selena just recently.

On one hand, there is Bieber himself, who is encouraging this false sense of intimacy; on the other are the fans’ parents, who are not taking the steps to tell their daughters that what they’re seeing is not real.

Smack in the middle are the fans themselves, mostly girls who come to believe that reacting to a personal choice (such as that of going out with one girls) with violence is the way to go. Just like in terrorism, Dr. Ravitz explains.

“Where are the parents? Who is trying to guide these kids? Who is telling them to be polite and civil to each other?” the child psychiatrist explains, trying to prove that the fault doesn’t lie exclusively with just one party.

“In a way, it’s analogous to terrorism, where the only thing important is your own personal agenda, and if anyone gets in the way of that, you’re allowed to do whatever you want to them,” Dr. Ravitz explains.

“If you’re a 10-year-old and you get a tweet from Justin, you don’t have the capacity for abstract thought. You can’t think, ‘Well, he probably has a PR person who generates these tweets for him.’ You as a 10-year-old think, ‘Oh, he’s sending this to me, he is telling me about his life’,” the psychiatrist goes on to detail.

“So on the one hand, he has this PR team creating this sense of false intimacy, and on the other hand he creates a problem for himself because he encourages intrusion into his private life. I don’t think he can have it both ways,” he adds.

But Bieber’s management is not to blame because it’s focused on generating profit: after all, this is a business. The fans’ parents are also responsible for exaggerated behavior such as that displayed towards Gomez.

It’s the parents who need to intervene and explain things to their teenage daughters, Dr. Ravitz believes. Then, the girls will be able to reason for themselves that violence and aggression (whichever shape it may take) are never the answer.

For more on this from Dr. Alan Ravitz, see the PopEater piece here.