Why are so many people looking online for ‘psoriasis pictures’? The Internet is an infinite repository in which one can find almost anything in a matter of seconds. With its tens of millions of hits, the search phrase ‘psoriasis pictures’ stands out. Yet the underlying issues it reflects are not isolated. Psoriasis is a chronic skin disorder and the various types can range from mild to extremely severe. The disease causes skin to become itchy, tender, dry and scaly, covered in red patches that can range in size from small silver dollar coins to significant expansions of the skin’s surface. While psoriasis is rarely life-threatening, if it covers wide areas the disease can be profoundly debilitating. Throughout the world, approximately 7.5 million people have psoriasis and an estimated 10 to 20 per cent of them experience health-threatening psoriasis affecting 10 per cent or more of the skin’s surface area.
The Visual Imperative
In an image-saturated world, where our screens function as mirrors and windows, the visual is at a premium. We look at pictures to make sense, to confirm, to empathise. When it comes to health, the instinct is particularly powerful. Googling images of psoriasis lets people assess their condition in a way that words cannot. For those who suspect they have psoriasis, these images allow for a rough self-diagnosis or at least a rough preparation for a conversation with a clinician. The comparison between one’s own skin and those presented on the internet is an attempt to interpret medical language into personal experience.
It’s not just those with direct personal experience who seek out psoriasis pictures. A broader public interest is at play, one that’s fuelled by the fact that the unfamiliar, the strange, the disturbing and the taboo hold a charged allure for human beings. Skin diseases such as psoriasis might go largely concealed under layers of clothing, under make-up or simply unspoken. The compulsion to search might be the lure of invading the privacy of the concealed and uncovering the previously unseen.
Stigma and Visibility
Looking for photographs to illustrate psoriasis also touches the complicated relationship between visibility and stigma. Skin is our most exposed organ, the surface where identity is inscribed for the rest of the world. When this surface is covered in psoriasis, its host might feel especially exposed, vulnerable to judgment and misapprehension. Though not contagious, the disease is routinely received with something between pity and disgust.
Living with psoriasis, then, these images of the condition might have a quasi-authenticating function – they are a way of connecting with someone else in the world who has had a similar experience to your own. Its sheer ubiquity can become a form of reassurance, a psychological antidote to the sense of isolation that so often comes with skin conditions that are visible to others.To the public outside this particular community, these images of psoriasis might help to dispel stigma by normalising the appearance of the condition.
However, the visual power of psoriasis creates both empathy and victimhood, both an understanding of the affliction and a voyeuristic gaze, what the anthropologist Andrea Wilson argued in 1998 in her collection on collective self-harm is a ‘gaze of the weird’, of the diseased and deformed body as a specimen. The slippery slope between sharing and sensationalism is easy to fall into, and in the visual feast of the internet, the willingness to feed that gaze is often unexamined and unchecked.
The Search for Connection
In the end, this search for pictures of psoriasis might be about a more basic human need for connection. Regardless of whether one is searching for information about oneself or a friend, or merely curious about this skin disorder, what we are really searching for is a deeper understanding of our humanity. In a society that often seems to equate appearance with social capital, images of psoriasis – and faces with psoriasis – can serve as an important reminder of shared humanity.
For people living with psoriasis, these images might be an opportunity for empowerment, a way to assert control over their own story by prefacing, or even displacing, the plethora of skin-related content online. For others, they might spark empathy, putting faces to conditions, and eroding false notions of what it means to live with a visible difference.
The Role of the Internet
The internet is a haunted house, a Hail Mary hivemind where we’re free to purge our collective anxieties and obsessions, and to find out what makes our skin crawl. A psoriasis pictures search might seem silly and goofy; yet it is profound, in the way that all Google searches – as half-baked explorations of what makes us tick – tend to be. Whatever happens next in this digital age of anxiety, our most human impulses appear to be as robust as ever: curiosity, empathy, the drive to relate. The trick will be in how we satisfy them.
