A notification lights up your phone. Someone you follow is live, and something is wrong. The person on screen is distressed, the comments are already scrolling past — some pleading, some cruel, some simply watching — and your thumb hovers. Do you share it? Screenshot it? Say something? Or keep scrolling and tell yourself someone else will handle it?
It is a situation more and more of us are being placed in, and it is rarely as simple as it looks. In a recent feature in The National on the psychological danger of live-streaming a mental-health crisis, psychiatrist Dr Melané van Zyl, a member of the South African Society of Psychiatrists (SASOP), offered a way to think clearly at exactly the moment most of us feel out of our depth.
You can read the full article as reported by The National here:
🔗 Tunnel vision in the spotlight: The psychological danger of live-streaming your pain
“A mental-health crisis is not a diagnosis. It is a situation in which a person’s usual psychological coping mechanisms have been overwhelmed,” Dr van Zyl explained.
A crisis is not a diagnosis
The instinct, when we watch someone unravel online, is to try to name what is wrong with them. Dr van Zyl gently closes that door. A crisis, she says, is not a label but a moment — one where a person’s ability to keep themselves safe, exercise judgement or care for themselves has been overwhelmed to the point of real concern.
That distinction matters because the screen invites the opposite. What you are seeing is a fragment, stripped of context, history and everything the person is not showing you.
“A viewer cannot diagnose someone from a livestream, and a single behaviour cannot establish a psychiatric condition,” she says.
The one question worth asking
Instead of asking what is wrong with this person, Dr van Zyl reframes the task around safety. The question to hold in your mind, she suggests, is simpler and far more useful:
“Is there enough evidence to be concerned that this person may be in immediate danger?”
If the answer is yes, or even uncertain, the response is not to deliberate. “When safety is uncertain, and the apparent risk is serious, the situation should be treated as a potential emergency rather than as a diagnostic puzzle,” she says. In practice that means reporting the stream through the platform’s emergency tools, contacting emergency services if the person’s location is known and danger seems imminent, and alerting someone physically near them if you can.
The livestream is not a performance to judge
There is a colder response the internet tends to reach for — the assumption that public distress is staged, exaggerated or simply “attention-seeking.” Dr van Zyl is firm that this reflex is both wrong and dangerous.
“The fact that distress is being livestreamed does not mean that it is staged, manipulative, ‘attention-seeking,’ or less serious.”
If anything, the public setting can make a person more vulnerable rather than less. In the grip of a crisis, she notes, “the person may have a reduced appreciation of what they are revealing, how widely it is being seen, or the long-term consequences of making it public.” The broadcast itself can be a symptom of how overwhelmed they are — not evidence that they are fine.
What a person in crisis actually needs
Why does an audience so often make things worse? Melandri Constant, a mental-health advocate and lay counsellor quoted in the same article, puts it plainly: “The audience can intensify rather than regulate the moment. Comments, reactions and demands for engagement pull the person further into distress or performance.”
What helps is the mirror image of a livestream.
“What a crisis actually needs is containment, privacy, calm, a trusted person. A livestream provides the opposite of all three.”
Responding with humanity
None of this means the responsibility rests on your shoulders alone. Cayley Jorgensen, a registered counsellor with the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG), offers a reassuring boundary: “Social media users are not expected to become emergency responders or mental-health professionals.” What we can offer is smaller and still significant — “we can choose to respond with humanity.”
That humanity shows up in what we choose not to do as much as what we do. Jorgensen draws a sharp line: “There is a very important distinction between sharing information to help someone access safety and sharing someone’s suffering because it is compelling content.” Resharing, downloading or reposting a person’s worst moment does nothing to help them and follows them long after the crisis passes. The kindest click is often no click at all.
Where to find help
If you or someone you know is struggling, you do not have to navigate it through a comments section. The South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG) offers free, confidential telephone counselling and can point you to the right help — visit www.sadag.org. Reaching a real person, sooner rather than later, is always worth it.
This article is based on the feature “Tunnel vision in the spotlight: The psychological danger of live-streaming your pain” by Vuyile Madwantsi, published in The National on 14 August 2026, which quotes Dr Melané van Zyl, board member of the South African Society of Psychiatrists.
About Dr Melané van Zyl
Dr Melané van Zyl is a psychiatrist and member of the South African Society of Psychiatrists (SASOP). She is committed to raising awareness about mental health and providing compassionate, evidence-based care for individuals living with psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and severe depression.
