Here’s Why People Are Fascinated With The Missing Submersible

In the four days since an OceanGate expeditions submersible went missing after embarking on a deep-ocean exploration of the famed Titanic shipwreck on June 18, the world collectively held its breath, waiting to see what happened to the vessel and the five people onboard. On the afternoon of June 22, the company confirmed that a debris field found in the North Atlantic matched the vessel, and that the five passengers are likely dead, per The New York Times. Apparently, the debris field indicates that the vessel imploded, according to an expert with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

The search for Titan took over the Internet in recent days, with people voicing their thoughts, anxieties, fascination, hot takes, and morbid jokes all over Twitter and TikTok. Everyone seemed invested in one way or another. After all, this situation provoked some of humanity’s deepest fears about a loss of control and hopelessness.

But to better understand why, exactly, everyone is so fascinated by this underwater tragedy, Women’s Health spoke with WH advisor Chloe Carmichael, PhD, a clinical psychologist, and author of Nervous Energy: Harness the Power of Your Anxiety.

Meet the expert: Chloe Carmichael, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, Women’s Health advisor, and author of Nervous Energy: Harness the Power of Your Anxiety.

At its core, Dr. Carmichael says that the situation is triggering because the submersible is not only tiny—roughly the size of a minivan with no room to stand up straight, per CNN—but passengers were also 13,000 feet underwater, had a limited supply of air, and were bolted in from the outside. This is the perfect storm for making people feel claustrophobic.

“When people are in a small, dark, cramped space, there’s a sense of feeling trapped and enclosed,” Dr. Carmichael says. “When we don’t have the option to leave or to get out, or to spread out, we sometimes correctly feel a sense of helplessness or a sense of anxiety because our options and our mobility are limited.”

Then comes the issue of the limited air supply. Breathing is supposed to be a helpful, calming mechanism. Say you’re on a crowded train or airplane and you’re getting claustrophobic—a psychologist might guide you to do some breathing exercises. But if passengers were stranded with only about 96 hours of air, they would likely have had to conserve their breathing.

The normal way to relieve some anxiety would be to do some deep breathing, but that’s “the one thing that is not available,” Dr. Carmichael continues. And lack of air makes people feel less relaxed and in control.

“When we get into these situations like in the submersible, where we know that there are people that are potentially running out of oxygen, the part of us that really empathizes with those people,” she explains.

Right now, some people might be coping with their anxieties about the submersible through catastrophic thinking, Carmichael says. While this may sound intense, the phenomenon can actually be a good, helpful thing. For example: If you’re preparing for a meeting, you might run through everything that could go wrong so you’re ready for anything that comes your way.

However, this type of thinking can be unhelpful if it becomes an automatic thought without any benefit of it helping you prepare. “You’re just sitting there running negative thoughts over and over in your mind without thinking of what you can do about them,” Carmichael explains. “The problem with that is that it can set up feelings of helplessness.”

Of course, there’s also the added layer of the fact that the submersible’s passengers were all ultra-wealthy people, so discussions about its disappearance has brought up a “class warfare situation,” Dr. Carmichael says. Memes and tweets have poked fun at it. In one tongue-in-cheek tweet, someone wrote: “If I were a billionaire stuck at the bottom of the ocean I would simply pull myself up by my bootstraps.” Meanwhile, another joked that an Orca had caused the sub to go missing.

“When those people are using said privileges to do wonderful, exciting things, and then something bad happens to them, there can be an immature or resentful part of some people,” Dr. Carmichael explains. For some, there might even be a sense of satisfaction.

And at the end of the day, perhaps part of the fascination—the part everyone should focus on, Dr. Carmichael adds—is that “they were not immune to things going wrong.”

“That can actually open up a vulnerability and a commonality that we all share.”

If you’re feeling triggered or overstimulated from the tragedy, here’s what you can do:

• Take a break. Consume a lighter form of media, like a movie or television show, or put your phone away altogether.
• Channel your anxiety. Use it for “preserving and cherishing and nurturing the connections that you do have,” Dr. Carmichael says. Reach out to the people you love. “Sometimes the fact of a tragedy outside of our own lives can actually heighten our awareness of the things that we want to hold closer in our lives.”
• Exercise a mindset of peaceful parting. Take the approach of someone who is facing death, like someone in hospice, or someone with a fatal illness, Dr. Carmichael says. You could write a letter with words of encouragement and hope or pieces of advice for the passengers in the submersible—maybe it has to do with people conquering this mission in the future and seeing the Titanic.
• Practice a breathing exercise. Dr. Carmichael suggests three-part breath, where you first put your hand on your belly, take a deep breath in, then the outer edge of your upper ribcage, breathe in again, then your upper chest, and breathe in. Feel how the different areas move, then exhale the upper chest, then the middle, then the lower. Don’t change your breath, but notice it “as if you had to notice five facts about your breath right now,” she says.
• Practice gratitude. Again, reach out to loved ones or people you haven’t connected with in a while and tell them what they mean to you.