A Cyberpsychology and Mental Health Dialogue About Digital Personhood

Abstract

Digital environments have become central to how individuals negotiate identity and personhood. Yet these environments also generate pervasive pressures to curate success, happiness, and desirability in ways that strain mental health. Building on Derakhshan, Soundararajan, Agarwal, and Crane’s (2024) theorization of personhood limbo among undocumented workers, this commentary introduces the notion of digital personhood limbo to conceptualize the unstable, contingent, and psychologically taxing nature of personhood in online contexts. Within digital personhood limbo, users must continuously manage representations of self, projecting false success, fabricating emotional well-being, exaggerating accomplishments, seeking validation, and sometimes constructing fictive identities, to secure recognition within algorithmically mediated attention economies. These strategies function as a form of personhood anchoring work, analogous to the relational, spatial, temporal, and moral anchoring undertaken by individuals in other liminal contexts. However, they also create significant cognitive and emotional burdens, including stress, anxiety, affective dissonance, and fatigue associated with sustained deception and impression management. Integrating personhood theory, this article argues that digital personhood is increasingly constituted as a precarious and mentally costly condition. KEYWORDS: personhood limbo, personhood, cyberpsychology, on-line behavior, on-line identity, impression management, perception, mental health risks JEL Codes: D9, D83, L83, 033, K38