This post is part 1 in a series.<\/p>\n
This year, a few stories have taken over our feeds, our group chats, our dinner tables, and, more often than I expected, my therapy<\/a> office.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t agree on whether she was criminally responsible.<\/p>\n In New York, a lawsuit alleges that seven Cornell University fraternity members sexually assaulted a fellow student in 2024. The accused, dubbed the \u201cCornell 7\u201d online, deny criminal responsibility, and the investigation has since been reopened.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Sadly, none of these stories is the first of its kind. Andrea Yates\u2019s trial put postpartum<\/a> psychosis<\/a> in front of a jury more than two decades ago. A case at Stanford turned a campus sexual assault<\/a> into a national argument in 2016. And the question of whether a young Black man\u2019s death will be honestly investigated is one Mississippi, and the country, has been asking since Emmett Till. What\u2019s different now is how fast, how loudly, and how personally these stories reach us.<\/p>\n Each involves real people and real grief<\/a>, and the way we connect to them runs along a spectrum, from curiosity to fascination\u2014and for some of us, all the way to activation. For many of my clients, staying informed has come at the cost of nervous system<\/a> dysregulation, and finding their way back to baseline has taken real therapeutic work.<\/p>\n In this series, I\u2019ll look at each case through a different psychological lens. But first, the question I hear constantly from clients, colleagues, and friends: Why can\u2019t I stop watching?<\/p>\n Reason One: Your Brain Is Practicing for Danger<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve 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\u2014morbid curiosity\u2014and 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?<\/p>\n That\u2019s why the details we fixate on tend to be so practical: Who was there? Who knew? Why didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Reason Two: We Struggle With Unfinished Business<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n None of these stories has an ending. A jury that couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s the same pull that keeps us watching a TV series after a cliffhanger, and the media knows it well.<\/p>\n Reason Three: We See Ourselves in the Details<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Reason Four: The Content Never Stops<\/p>\n How we take in these stories has changed, too. Courtroom livestreams, recap videos, theories, and memes<\/a> show up within hours of every development. The algorithm rewards what\u2019s most emotional, not what\u2019s most accurate. And picking a side offers something a lot of us crave: a community of people who feel the way we do.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> than some people who were actually at the scene. Repeated exposure doesn\u2019t just inform our threat system; it can keep it switched on.<\/p>\n From Informed to Activated<\/p>\n A few signs that following a case has shifted from informing you to activating you:<\/p>\n You keep scrolling even though you feel worse each time. None of this means something is wrong with you. Your attention<\/a> 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\u2019s coming up for you.<\/p>\n Future posts in this weekly series will focus on the Lindsay Clancy trial, the Cornell case, and the sons who didn’t come home.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re struggling, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide<\/a> & Crisis Lifeline. To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This post is part 1 in a series. 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\nYou\u2019re sleeping<\/a> less, or replaying details at night.
\nYou feel irritable, numb, or on edge in situations that have nothing to do with the case.
\nComment-section arguments feel personal and are hard to shake.
\nYou\u2019re checking for updates compulsively, even when you know there aren\u2019t any.<\/p>\n