Websites that glamorize depression are proliferating across the Internet, particularly on photo-oriented sites such as Tumblr. Some experts believe these sites can be dangerous for teens.

“There’s definitely a growing community of people feeding off of each other’s strong emotions, and it’s definitely visible online,” says a 16-year-old girl whom The Atlantic simply called Laura U. She was attracted to the images that appeared on her Tumblr dashboard—beautiful women with faraway looks, people with scars on their wrists, pro-suicide quotes—and felt they applied to her.

The thing was, she wasn’t clinically depressed. She was, as she says, a “wannabe” depressive: someone to whom the glamour of such images appealed, particularly when she was feeling blue. Experts say the Internet’s penchant for niche communities can be particularly unhealthy for teens such as Laura.

“What you can get sometimes is a reverberating ‘echo chamber’ of girls who are sharing these experiences and these thoughts, and it potentiates the negative feelings, the depression,” says Dr. Mark Reinecke, chief psychologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. (The Atlantic)

Paul Asay has covered religion for The Washington Post, Christianity Today, Beliefnet.com and The (Colorado Springs) Gazette. He writes about culture for Plugged In and wrote the Batman book God on the Streets of Gotham (Tyndale). He lives in Colorado Springs with wife Wendy and his two children. Follow him on Twitter.