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Teenager Hated His Selfies, So He Tried Ending His Life

by 10 Comments

The front camera of the iPhone.

“I was constantly in search of taking the perfect selfie and when I realized I couldn’t I wanted to die.”

19 year Danny Bowman said these words to a reporter for the Daily Mirror. According to the story, he spent ten hours a day taking about 200 snaps of himself with his iPhone. He would take restroom breaks from his classes to go and try taking pictures there. And then in December 2012, after so much dissatisfaction from how his pictures turned out, he took an overdose of meds and attempted suicide.

 

His parents found him, rushed him to a hospital, and he survived. Every day, as he was in his hospital bed, his parents would begin to take his phone away from him for ten minutes. Then twenty. Then an hour, and so on. And now it’s been seven months since his last selfie.

Honestly, this story gives us one of the best possible headline titles we’ve ever gotten because of just how absurd it sounds, but that isn’t what we should be taking from it. Every network that published this story began to receive comments that focused on nothing but the fact that a kid tried to kill himself because of ‘selfies’. Yeah, it sounds stupid, but this is what life is like for people with Body Dysmorphic Disorder. Danny isn’t a one in a million case, and he’s lucky to have even had his story heard just because of how ridiculous it sounds in a nutshell. Today, he’s working with a charity called Fixers to raise awareness of mental illness in youth.

[Via TIME via Daily Mirror]

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About Maaz Khan

Maaz Khan started off teaching himself photography with a disposable Kodak camera he got for his 7th birthday. His main weapons of choice are now the 5D Mark II, and an LG G2 when mobility calls.

You can find some of his work at his website, twitter Twitter @drcon and Instagam @maazcon

  • C Jacobs

    I’m going to go out on a limb and say this individual had bigger issues than a supposed dislike of his selfies.

    • Maaz Khan

      “…this is what life is like for people with Body Dysmorphic Disorder.”

  • Yousra Yous

  • Greg Heller

    Glad to hear he survived hopefully he’ll find a way beyond all this, praying for you Danny

  • Rich

    I absolutely am glad that Danny has recovered from this, but story aside. I feel that I’m reading a news site and not DIY Photography anymore. It appears that the focus is more about quantity and not quality.

    • Maaz Khan

      Yo! I just wanted to address your concerns. DIY Photography is starting to work on building a news section. If you see a post from me, it’s most likely news. Other than that, everything is still the same way it’s always been. Just wanted to let you know we haven’t changed anything in the process!

      • Is there a way to separate out the RSS feeds? I have seen this same “news” story on other sites as well and frankly don’t want to see it at all, let alone in a DIY Photography feed. It has nothing to do with the reason I follow the site.

        I understand that there is a battle for clicks out there and you need to create more traffic. But I feel obliged to let you know that there are people out there (like me) who will stop coming to the site at all if you intermingle stuff like this into the normally great posts that have been published here.

        • Rich

          Maaz, thanks for getting back. Although there’s nothing wrong with your posts, I tend to agree with dorn above as I initially followed this site for more gear/diy posts. I seem to also see a lot of light blaster posts too which I guess is pretty much turned into an advertisement now. It’s a shame the site has somewhat lost its roots.

          • Hi @rich, @dorn:disqus ,
            first, thanks a ton for taking the time to let us know how you feel. You are right in the fact that DIYP is changing its editorial line and aside from gear, DIYs and inspirational posts, we are now also covering news.

            I know that DIYP started as a very hacknslash site dealing mostly with the frugality and innovation of gear. Sadly it is hard to tell a complete photography story from DIY perspective alone so we added news, and announcements and a few other topics to cover.
            Maaz, I and the team are doing a great effort to do more than simply echo the news, and we always try to add value to our posts, either by providing a fresh point of view or adding missing data.
            It would be great if you gave us a shot as a news outlet, we are trying really hard :)

            If we fail to be awesome, you can always subscribe only to the categories you love, like so:

            https://www.diyphotography.net/category/%5BCAT_NAME%5D/feed/

            so for DIY it would be
            https://www.diyphotography.net/category/diy/feed/
            and for tutorials:
            https://www.diyphotography.net/category/tutorials/feed/

  • First world issues.

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