Consuming too much true crime can take a toll on your mental health

Why do we keep consuming true crime content when it can play on our minds in grave ways?

One recent summer day, a guy on a motorbike stopped Aakash Ranison in Delhi’s Malviya Nagar. He wanted directions to an address. “I felt something was wrong,” says the 27-year-old author and artist. “Right after this, another biker took a U-turn around me. I put my phone inside my bag, pulled off my headphones and clipped them to my bag, to be prepared in case something happened.” 

Of course, nothing happened. Ranison later wondered what had brought on this moment of suspicion within him in broad daylight. Perhaps it had something to do with his binge-watch sessions? It very well could be, given true crime was his staple diet.

“I’d watched Kerala Story recently, but found it to be biased. Then I watched Caliphate, and found it moving,” he says, referring, respectively, to the controversial 2023 Indian film and the 2020 Swedish Netflix series that are based on separate “real-life” incidents involving teenage girls trapped in a web of ISIS and terrorism. Since watching these, “I’ve been feeling a little different about how I see people and what they believe in.” 

Aggravating an existing condition? 

Ranison’s experience speaks to the psychological blowback of an addiction to true crime—and is echoed by many other fans of the genre. “When I was watching Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (Netflix), I used to be afraid to step out of my room at night,” relates lifestyle journalist Radhika Agrawal. “I would run to the kitchen and back if I needed to fetch some water. There was this strange sensation of someone watching me, waiting to jump out. It’s a feeling you’d usually get after watching a horror movie.”  

There’s also the matter of existing mental health issues being exacerbated by bingeing on true crime; where it may not be the direct cause, but a catalyst to what’s already brewing under the lid. “About 70-80 per cent of my viewing was true crime and shows about strife,” says Mumbai-based publicist Amrita Hom Ray. “But my overall anxiety in life was increasing so I had to consciously stop searching for these.” 

“It started with Crime Patrol for me, I couldn’t stay off it,” says Dipannita Biswas, a communications professional based in Gurugram. She is referring to the blockbuster Indian true crime series that has been airing since 2003. She has since felt paranoia, cynicism, scepticism, and apprehension. “There were two episodes, especially,” she continues. “One, where the father was accused of molesting the daughter and another, where the mother wanted to elope with her lover but didn’t know what to do with her two kids and fed them mosquito repellent. It was like, who do we trust? Anyone can hurt anyone.”

Delhi-based psychiatrist Shwetank Bansal often finds it necessary to ask his Hindi-speaking clients, especially males over the age of 65, to stop watching Crime Patrol at night. “It’s their guilty pleasure, but I tell them, if they want to deal with sleeplessness, this would be an important step.”   

A hankering for more

Late-night jitters to paranoia: Why do we keep consuming true crime content when the toll it can take on our mental health can be anything from a temporary bad mood to something darker and longer-lasting? “One of the things that attracts people to crime-related stories is that this genre unmasks what is hidden,” says Bansal. It’s fascinating to be able to peel back the layers on the worst impulses of humankind, he explains, and feeds into the natural inquisitiveness that we harbour. 

Standing on that fear-thrill axis was an experience that many of us first felt when watching the blockbuster Netflix true crime documentary, Making a Murderer. Its first season released in December 2015, and rapidly became one of the first global hits for the (then) nascent streaming platform. In an interview with the LA Times in 2016, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said: “Over Christmas break, everyone I’ve ever known was texting me about Making a Murderer… It’s a combination of wonderfully addictive storytelling and release timing.”

Since then, while Netflix has come to dominate the genre of true crime, podcasts have supplied much of the drip as the demand for such content has spiked year on year, beginning with the record-breaking success of Sarah Koenig’s 2014 podcast Serial. It’s telling that one of the most popular comedy dramas on air right now, Only Murders In the Building, is a spoof on this very phenomenon. Almost a decade apart, true crime media rules because at a basic level, as Sarandos put it in 2016: “It scares people. I think when people see things like that, they think it could happen to them.” 

Resonance, fear, a sense of justice done aside, “it can correlate to morbid curiosity,” Bansal says, referring to our fixation on the macabre, the violent, the torturous. “There is one personality trait, especially–the sensation-seeking type, or people who continuously want those new experiences. They tend to be especially attracted to true crime. The allure of the dark side, the fear that it can create is tied up with the thrill it generates.”

“What happens is that as they continue to consume such media, everything else begins to seem too bland,” Bansal continues. For the sensation-seeking personality type, the “spice threshold” keeps rising. “Even outside true crime, look at Game of Thrones or what Quentin Tarantino makes,” he says. “The gore threshold has gone up over time.” Creators have felt the need for more of it to invoke emotion in their audiences.

In most cases, according to Bansal, the psychological impact of watching a little too much true crime can vary. “Yes, it can contribute to existing anxiety disorders, mild depression, furthering a negative view of the world. While it can’t cause depression, it can be a contributing factor. It can amplify that 0.1 per cent human behaviour, where people might experience cognitive biases, automatic thoughts, jumping to conclusions; they might be prone to generalisation and over-catastrophisation. And it can induce phobic responses to certain situations.” 

Ranison’s (non-)encounter on the streets of South Delhi has not tempered his enthusiasm for true crime. “I really enjoy it,” he says, adding that 95 per cent of his Netflix recommendations are in the true crime genre, and that he’s also very much into the Desi Crime Podcast by Aryaan Misra and Aishwarya Singh. “I spend a lot of time learning about terrorist organisations, global terrorism and a country’s conflicts, serial killers, psychopaths, their behaviour and agendas. I find it interesting to learn about how and why they are so different from other humans.” 

Even as we find ourselves hooked to stories that are, truly, stranger than fiction, Bansal issues a word of caution. As in all other areas of consumption, he suggests a balance. “True crime shouldn’t occupy more than 20-30 per cent of your screen time,” he advises. Break it up with drama, comedy, romance. “There must always be various stimuli.” 

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