This post is part 1 in a series.

This year, a few stories have taken over our feeds, our group chats, our dinner tables, and, more often than I expected, my therapy office.

In Massachusetts, the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse who killed her three young children, ended in a mistrial in September after jurors couldn’t agree on whether she was criminally responsible.

In New York, a lawsuit alleges that seven Cornell University fraternity members sexually assaulted a fellow student in 2024. The accused, dubbed the “Cornell 7” online, deny criminal responsibility, and the investigation has since been reopened.

In Mississippi, 18-year-old Nolan Wells went to Horn Island with friends on the Fourth of July and never came home. Months later, his family is still searching for answers. So is the family of Daniel Erving, an 18-year-old in Texas who drowned in April after jumping into a lake with two companions, both of whom are now charged with tampering with evidence.

Sadly, none of these stories is the first of its kind. Andrea Yates’s trial put postpartum psychosis in front of a jury more than two decades ago. A case at Stanford turned a campus sexual assault into a national argument in 2016. And the question of whether a young Black man’s death will be honestly investigated is one Mississippi, and the country, has been asking since Emmett Till. What’s different now is how fast, how loudly, and how personally these stories reach us.

Each involves real people and real grief, and the way we connect to them runs along a spectrum, from curiosity to fascination—and for some of us, all the way to activation. For many of my clients, staying informed has come at the cost of nervous system dysregulation, and finding their way back to baseline has taken real therapeutic work.

In this series, I’ll look at each case through a different psychological lens. But first, the question I hear constantly from clients, colleagues, and friends: Why can’t I stop watching?

Reason One: Your Brain Is Practicing for Danger

If you’ve found yourself deep in the rabbit hole, following every new detail with a commitment that goes well beyond curiosity, you are not alone. Researchers have a name for this pull—morbid curiosity—and they describe it as an ordinary human trait. Coltan Scrivner and colleagues propose that our draw toward frightening events helps us learn about threats from a safe distance. When we read about a tragedy, part of the mind is quietly running a simulation: How did this happen? What were the signs? Could this happen to me, or to my kids?

That’s why the details we fixate on tend to be so practical: Who was there? Who knew? Why didn’t anyone call? Underneath those questions is a mind trying to build a map of danger, driven by something as old as we are: self-preservation.

Reason Two: We Struggle With Unfinished Business

In the 1920s, psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik observed that people tend to remember interrupted tasks better than completed ones. The broader idea, that unfinished business keeps tugging at us, goes a long way toward explaining why these particular stories have such a hold. This is similar to why we replay events in our head, such as breakups, when we feel we are missing important details. We seek closure.

None of these stories has an ending. A jury that couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict. An investigation reopened. A family still waiting to learn how their son died. When a story stays open, the mind keeps circling back, refreshing the feed in case the answer has finally arrived. It’s the same pull that keeps us watching a TV series after a cliffhanger, and the media knows it well.

Reason Three: We See Ourselves in the Details

A tragedy becomes personal when we can see ourselves, or someone we love, inside it. A mother who seemed to be functioning. A college student at a party. A teenager on a summer trip with friends. Nothing about these circumstances is extraordinary. They map right onto ordinary life, and that ordinariness is exactly what makes them so frightening. The feeling of association is what keeps us engaged.

Reason Four: The Content Never Stops

How we take in these stories has changed, too. Courtroom livestreams, recap videos, theories, and memes show up within hours of every development. The algorithm rewards what’s most emotional, not what’s most accurate. And picking a side offers something a lot of us crave: a community of people who feel the way we do.

The cost of all this is easy to miss. After the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, researchers found that people who took in six or more hours of coverage a day in the week that followed reported more acute stress than some people who were actually at the scene. Repeated exposure doesn’t just inform our threat system; it can keep it switched on.

From Informed to Activated

A few signs that following a case has shifted from informing you to activating you:

You keep scrolling even though you feel worse each time.
You’re sleeping less, or replaying details at night.
You feel irritable, numb, or on edge in situations that have nothing to do with the case.
Comment-section arguments feel personal and are hard to shake.
You’re checking for updates compulsively, even when you know there aren’t any.

None of this means something is wrong with you. Your attention is doing exactly what it evolved to do, but you get to choose how you feed it. Try setting a defined window for news, muting keywords for a few days, or reading one reliable summary instead of watching the clips. And talk with someone you trust about what’s coming up for you.

Future posts in this weekly series will focus on the Lindsay Clancy trial, the Cornell case, and the sons who didn’t come home.

If you’re struggling, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.