Is Social Media Psychology Creating a Crisis of Isolation?
- Apr 8
- 7 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Written by Roje Khalique, Founder of rkTherapy
Roje Khalique is a visionary clinical consultant with 20 years of experience in mental health. She is the founder of rkTherapy, a London-based bespoke psychology consultancy, and a specialist in culturally attuned Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).
If social media psychology continues to advocate for replacing connection with avoidance, we risk creating a generation of high achievers that is emotionally aware but relationally disconnected. For diaspora professionals navigating two worlds, two cultures, and two sets of expectations, that is not progress. It is the loneliest kind of success.
We are living in an era of unprecedented psychological literacy. Terms once confined to clinical rooms, such as boundaries, triggers, emotional availability, and no contact, now saturate our social media feeds. On the surface, this looks like progress. The issue is not psychology itself, but how it is being simplified and amplified through social media, where nuanced clinical tools are reduced to rigid rules for living.
As a consultant psychotherapist working with high achievers in Black, Asian, and ethnically diverse communities, my colleagues and I are observing a darker, more divisive trend. What is being presented as healing is, in many cases, encouraging disconnection. What is being framed as empowerment is, in practice, increasing isolation. Nowhere is this more concerning than among diaspora high achievers, professionals who have already mastered the art of appearing fine, who are less likely to seek help, and who are now being handed a psychological permission slip to sever the very relationships that sustain them.
The science of connection
Humans are social animals, we are not designed to function in isolation. A 2023 study published in The Lancet identifies social isolation and lack of interaction as significant predictors of both depression and physical health decline. In my practice, we are seeing a rise in depression and anxiety among diaspora high achievers in the legal and finance sectors. These are individuals who present as highly functional and self-sufficient, meeting every external marker of success, yet suffering in silence and internalising the belief that they should be able to cope alone. It is reinforced daily by a wellness culture that packages withdrawal as wisdom.
We saw this clearly during and after the lockdowns. Avoidance over time leads to the weakening of the social muscle, resulting in social anxiety and depression. For diaspora professionals, whose wellbeing has historically been held within community and family networks rather than formal systems, the cost of that decline is not abstract. It is clinical, and we are seeing it.
"Protect my peace" and the rise of no contact
Despite our biological need for connection, social media promotes "protect my peace" as a daily mantra. In practice, this has become, block people, delete contacts, go no contact. We are seeing individuals go no contact with siblings, friends, and elderly parents over everyday disagreements. For a diaspora professional already navigating the complexity of intergenerational relationships, family obligations, and cultural expectations, this message is particularly seductive. It offers a clean exit from what is, in reality, a relationship that requires skill, patience, and often professional support to navigate.
No contact is, in a clinical setting, a serious intervention reserved for situations of intentional abuse or extreme distress. If someone is causing repeated, deliberate harm, removing yourself is legitimate and sometimes necessary. But using it as a response to everyday conflict, to disagreement, or to difference raises a fundamental question about our capacity to navigate life among people who are not like us. These tools were designed to help us create healthy relationships, not to justify leaving them. What we are observing is a shift from relational resilience to relational avoidance. It creates distance and, ultimately, isolation.
When boundaries become barriers
In therapy, a boundary is not a wall. It is a guideline that communicates, this is how I can remain in a healthy relationship with you. Used correctly, boundaries require communication, flexibility, and accountability. What we are increasingly seeing in practice is something quite different, boundaries used as justification for distance, silence, and withdrawal, where the question shifts from how do we stay connected to how quickly can I remove you.
For a diaspora professional navigating a parent who expresses love through action rather than words, or a sibling shaped by an entirely different cultural moment, labelling that person as someone who has crossed a boundary and withdrawing is not a therapeutic act. It is a loss that may take years to understand and that no wellness mantra will undo. When boundaries become rigid, uncommunicated, or punitive, they stop being therapeutic tools and become barriers. The misapplication of this concept within diaspora families, where intergenerational and cultural differences in emotional expression are already present, can fracture bonds that took generations to build.
The "triggered" narrative
Being triggered is increasingly used to place full responsibility for our emotional responses onto others. Unless there is intentional harm or abuse, being triggered is clinical information about our own internal world, not a verdict on someone else's character. It is, at its most useful, a signal that something internal requires our attention and, where necessary, professional support.
The message that has taken hold on social media, that being triggered justifies removing people from our lives, is a move away from personal agency and towards externalising distress. For diaspora high achievers, who may already be managing significant internal pressure with little visible support, this narrative is particularly unhelpful. It redirects energy away from the internal work that would genuinely build resilience and towards managing the behaviour of everyone around them. That is not emotional health. It is emotional exhaustion.
The misuse of emotional unavailability
Labelling others as emotionally unavailable has become one of the most common justifications for ending or distancing from relationships. In clinical practice, emotional unavailability refers to a consistent and specific pattern of relational withdrawal. On social media, it has come to mean anyone who does not express care in the language of modern psychology.
For diaspora communities, this is particularly divisive. A parent who shows up, provides, sacrifices, and protects but does not verbalise emotions in the way wellness culture now expects is not emotionally unavailable. They are operating from a different but equally valid emotional framework, often one shaped by necessity, culture, and survival. Expecting people to adopt a single emotional language, and penalising them when they do not, creates division where understanding is both possible and necessary. Not everyone we love will speak the same emotional dialect. That is not a reason to lose them.
The hyper independence trap
Running beneath all these trends is a deeper and largely unquestioned idea, that needing no one is a sign of emotional strength. Hyper independence, the belief that we can and should manage entirely alone, that we are entitled to remove anyone who causes us discomfort, is being sold as self-care. It is not. In practice, we see harm created at both ends of the relational spectrum. Co-dependency, where we cannot function without others' approval, is widely recognised as unhealthy. Hyper independence is equally damaging and far less challenged.
For diaspora high achievers who have already internalised self-sufficiency as a survival strategy, often out of necessity, this message does not challenge a harmful pattern. It confirms one. The idea that emotional health means needing no one is not a psychological achievement. It is a vulnerability dressed up as strength, and it is one that leaves people increasingly alone while believing they have chosen freedom.
What this means for diaspora high achievers
Each of these trends carries its own risk. Together, directed at diaspora high achievers specifically, they are disproportionately dangerous. During periods of racial discrimination, social instability, or anti immigration sentiment, connection is not optional, it is protective. Friends, family, and community are often the primary sources of emotional and practical support where wider systems fall short. The diaspora high achiever already carries a particular weight, the pressure to succeed, to remain resilient, to represent, and to cope without visible struggle. They are, by training and by necessity, experts at performing wellness while managing something far more complicated underneath.
For that same person to be simultaneously encouraged to disengage from their relational networks over everyday conflict is not empowerment. It is isolation without a safety net. One must first have the capacity to build and sustain connection before losing the most enduring relationships one has. This is not a theoretical concern. We are seeing it in our clinical rooms.
The path forward
If your emotional health is being impacted, seeking professional support to develop the capacity to regulate yourself must always be the first step. "Protect your peace" and "set boundaries," as presented on social media, are not psychotherapy methods. They are distorted forms of wellness language that become harmful when misapplied. Based on what we are observing in clinical practice, they are contributing to a rise in depression and anxiety among diaspora high achievers, the very people least likely to ask for help and most likely to lose the most by cutting away their foundations.
The path forward is not found on the lonely island of isolation, but in the nuanced practice of interdependence. For diaspora communities, our strength has always been rooted in connection, the complex, sometimes painful, often imperfect ties to family and community that no modern system can fully replace. True psychological maturity is not the ability to walk away from everyone who challenges us. It is the capacity to remain connected, to pursue repair before withdrawal, and to build the emotional skills that make those things possible.
We must collectively challenge social media messages that treat every disagreement as trauma and every difficult person as a threat. By strengthening our social muscle and embracing the friction that comes with genuine community, we do not just protect our peace. We build resilience that lasts.
Visit my website for more info!
Read more from Roje Khalique
Roje Khalique, Founder of rkTherapy
Roje is a clinical practitioner for a wide range of anxiety disorders and depression. She is dedicated to making quality psychological support accessible to high-achieving professionals in the legal and finance industries in London's high-stakes corporate world. During COVID-19 she recognised a global and increasing need for evidence-based support and developed a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) online, virtual platform and a mobile app. Designed to fit the demanding schedules of professionals not only in London but across Europe, the US, the Middle East, and Asia.
