Almost every teenager today knows what a selfie is. For those of you who don't, it is a photograph that you take of yourself, usually using a smartphone. According to Pew Research Center, 91 percent of teens have posted a selfie online. As of today, more than 31 million Instagram photos have been hashtagged #selfie. If so many people are doing this, it's not bad, right? Wrong. Selfies are harmful. They lower self-esteem, alienate friends and relatives, and could even damage your health. It’s shocking what a photograph can do.

Taking selfies can distance you from your friends and relatives. “People, other than very close friends and relatives don’t seem to relate well to those who constantly share photos of themselves,” says Dr. David Houghton, a professor at Birmingham Business School. Studies have also found that people felt less supported by relationship partners who shared more photos (including selfies) of friends and events than of family. Houghton also says, “…selfies…seem to be some of the most irksome images.” I couldn’t agree more.

Not only do selfies alienate you, but they can lower your self-esteem. Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist from Beverly Hills, California, says, “The rise of the selfie is a perfect metaphor for our increasingly narcissistic culture. We’re desperately crying out: Look at me!” Eventually, self-esteem may start to be connected to the comments and likes you get when you upload a selfie on a social-media network, and they are based on what you look like instead of who you are as a person. “In my experience, girls who repeatedly post selfies struggle with low self-esteem,” says psychiatrist Jill Webber, Ph. D.

Here comes the shocker you probably weren’t expecting: taking selfies could damage your health. “Two out of three of all the patients who come to see me with Body Dysmorphic Disorder since the rise of camera phones have a compulsion to repeatedly take selfies,” says psychiatrist Dr. David Veal. Body Dysmorphic Disorder is a body-image disorder characterized by persistent and intrusive preoccupations with an imagined or slight defect in one's appearance. One of Veal’s patients, British 19-year-old Danny Bowman, attempted suicide because he couldn’t take what he called “the perfect selfie.” Bowman spent up to ten hours each day trying to take that perfect selfie and constantly fought with his parents. Eventually, his addiction forced him to drop out of school and retreat to his home for six months, where he lost about 28 pounds.

Do you now see how dangerous selfies are? They’re a drug: they begin as an innocent way of having fun but then make you become addicted to them. To battle a drug addiction, people must stop taking the drugs. That’s how we should get rid of selfies: just stop taking and posting so many. Come to appreciate who you are as a person on your own instead of relying on others. Let’s delete this image from our lives.