The NFT community is no stranger to mental health issues.

Mental Health in the NFT Community — Psychologartist Harald Hurda

We see no shortage of NFT community members in our daily Twitter feeds expressing how they deal with their own problems in their tweets and in their art.

Harald Hurda, MsC is uniquely positioned to discuss the mental health issues that are prevalent within the NFT space — he’s part of it.

Hurda describes himself as a “psychologist in Vienna doing audiovisual experiments via short films.”

“One thing I’ve seen several times is the lack of visibility — a huge impact on self-esteem. I’ve seen people defining themselves as worthless because nobody (or very few people) reacts to their art. This could seriously lead to mental health problems like depressive symptoms.

“The space where we are currently “selling” our artworks is not really made for selling or promotions, so everyone must be very aware that sometimes posts are simply not visible to other users. Another thing is that people mostly post their “highlights”, like sales and such. Reading only positive things by other users can be motivating but on the other hand, this can make them feel even worse.

Remember Your Intent

“A certain way to handle difficulties from the outside is to increase the intrinsic value of your art. Besides creating artwork to show it to other people, you also create art for yourself. While going through the artistic process, you may process certain emotions or experiences. This can be a tool to reflect on yourself and your growth. Every person starts with a certain motive or message to convey. I’ve read many reasons why people started creating art pieces. If a sense of invisibility strikes, I think it is important to focus on the reason why you started doing art in the first place.”

Process Your Emotions

“Another way to handle invisibility is to potentially process these emotions in your next artwork. Take your medium and express your frustration in your piece. In that way, you can make it more visible for others, and also use a reflecting process to handle (your emotions) better.

“People generally tend to measure success in numbers, which is a logical step to make it more comprehensible. In this case, this could be rather unhealthy. A single like can be as valuable as 100 likes and 10 likes can be as fruitful as 1000.”

Become Proactive

“I think a big contribution to depressed thoughts is the feeling of lacking control. A very big help to overcome invisibility is to stop the passive waiting to be seen. Slip into the active role! This gives you a sense of control and boosts your confidence. Talk to other people in the space. Look for interesting posts and participate. Look for other artists possibly struggling and help them out with a like, RT, or comment. Talk with them about their experience and maybe get useful tips. Interacting with others will certainly earn you a well deserved RT or two. Use the hashtags and look for artists working in similar mediums. Try to engage collaborations with other artists. This will help you to enlarge your audience. Join other social media sites and make your reach bigger. Joining other chats via Spaces, Clubhouse, Discord and such, helps you to share experiences. Doing all that gives you control, is much more fun than solely promoting and will help you realize you are not alone with your worries and issues. It is certainly human to feel down sometimes.

“Social media basically is designed to (get someone to) spend as much time as possible (online), using many potentially addicting mechanisms like endless scrolling, easy one-click interactions, and instant-gratification via likes, RT’s or similar. These mechanisms combined with a “fear of missing out” can be seriously addicting, creating an impact on one’s social life.”

Step Back

“Do something you love outside the artspace. Take some time for yourself and recharge yourself. Create a list of pleasant activities and use it to your advantage. I know there are many people working full time as artists, having a lot of pressure creating visibility and sales. If you’re working full time, treat this space like a job and use fixed time windows. Separate your workspace from your free time to find time to relax and distract yourself.”

“These are the same issues we have outside of NFTs. The semi-anonymity of our online persona makes it even easier for some people to break inappropriate boundaries. I find it hard to pinpoint certain communicative warning signs because of the complexity of the topic. I think we can agree that we generally know the rules to be a decent human being, but somehow some people choose to break these rules deliberately.”

Define Boundaries

“I can think of writing down a proper etiquette. We are in a very new space. Many do’s and don’ts may not be defined clearly right now. I don’t think this will stop harassment in private messages, but it may deescalate certain misunderstandings, like unwanted shilling in DMs and such.”

Speak Out

“Being in a community has the advantage of having many ears and eyes to listen to you. I highly encourage everyone to speak up if anything inappropriate happens. With time, you’ll gain partners and friends, who will listen to your story and get your back. If you have ‘witnesses’ (other people who went through the same experience) they may have felt the same way as you. You could connect with them.

“Without referring to any specific case, it is very hard from the outside to actually see what really happened (in some of these situations where many people within the community get upset and start giving hell to a specific person for perceived misdeeds). There can be many other explanations of what really happened than the public narrative. A crowd of people tend to make more extreme decisions than single people. It could all be some mistake, misinformation or other explanations. Most of us use English, even if it’s not our main language, so (an offense) could be a big translational error as well.”

Sensitivity and Objectivity

“I won’t protect people doing the unrightful, but as a community we must be sensitive to both sides. Imagine everything’s a big misunderstanding and hundreds of people are judging one person, even possibly ruining the potential future in the NFT space. I despise that thought. Many new people are joining every day. It is our responsibility to show them the rules. And if someone needs to defend themself from some accusation, maybe it’s good to ‘translate’ the actual problem to the individual, because we know exactly what it’s about. We come from many different cultural and societal backgrounds and have our own unique biography, so it’s no wonder people may not understand things and rules at first.”

Related posts:

So it has actually started. I thought for a while it was all a joke, maybe a bad dream but no… I am indeed here, finally studying something I like and something that will put me in a situation in…

Selling products and services generates cash for any business, but managing and optimizing cash can be a challenge. In some organizations it is finely tuned, yet for others it is a month-to-month…

Many people would like to have fame, money,power but when we get them we are not satisfied.We feel within ourselves uncompleted. We want that people should love us and for this purpose we sacrifice…