In the last decade, true crime has reached a peak in popularity and people are loving it. Books like “The Girl in the Leaves” and “If you Tell” top best-seller lists. Shows like “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” and “Love and Death” populate streaming services. And podcasts like “Morbid” and “My Favorite Murder” top most-listened to charts. But is this recent obsession becoming dangerous for society?
But is society’s fascination with true crime healthy? The belief that a sliver into a serial killer’s psyche can mean life or death is where the appeal lies. Not only that, but humans are also just curious as to what makes people do what they do. There is nothing wrong with being interested in true crime, however if it is beginning to become all you think about, and a factor in your decision making, that is when it becomes a more serious issue.
Excessive consumption of what may seem like a casual interest or hobby can lead to mental health instability. Listening to people getting kidnapped or killed in what seemed like a safe situation can cause excessive anxiety about the “What ifs?”. Dr. Steve Jacobs, associate professor of sociology at Piedmont University says that too much true crime can lead to overthinking.
“When people are watching a lot of that kind of content, they might have an inflated sense of what can happen,” he says.
The overconsumption of true crime can lead to the idea that real crime is worse than it actually is. Crime has been so publicized in the last few years despite the fact that violent crime has actually decreased dramatically in the United States over the past 20 years. The media sometimes gives people a false sense of reality by reporting on a lot of the crime that does happen. “These stories, when they do happen, are awful, but they’re really unlikely to happen to any given person,” Jacobs says.
The solution for the general public is to limit how much true crime they’re watching in their everyday life and to separate it from reality. But what about the people who knew the victims of the true crime personally?
As more and more true crime productions are being made, we have to think about the people who experienced these crimes first hand. Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story has been the most controversial true crime productions made in the past few years. Family members of some of the victims voiced their disapproval with the show as it forced them to relieve such a traumatic experience.
“I think there’s an interesting ethical question there,” says Jacobs, “What does it mean when you’re producing something but there are people who have a relationship to it. What do you do there?”
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