Glorifying Mental Illnesses on Social Media
By Shyla Shah
If you are a teenager with a phone and an internet connection, chances are that you’ve probably gone through a good amount of social media. And if you’ve spent some time on Tumblr around 2016, you’d have most likely stumbled upon posts that flat out describe suicidal people as “angels who just want to return home”.
Oxford Dictionary defines the verb romanticization as “To deal with or describe in an idealized or unrealistic fashion; make (something) seem better or more appealing than it really is”. And that’s broadly what some accounts across the internet seem to be doing with regards to mental illnesses. Ironically, they used to be heavily stigmatized in society and branded as something that wasn’t real or “just in your minds”. But now they are portrayed as if they’re “desirable” or “beautiful”. Of course, as time progressed, people started getting more comfortable around the discussion of mental health issues. However, it does seem like this comfort is taken to a whole new level on social media.
Young artists who wanted a platform to show their creativity and works were granted with one as the use of the internet became common. Today, these illustrations are the main medium through which the glorification of various mental illnesses is done. Images with purple & grey filters can paint depression as something that’s “tragically beautiful”. Text posts, poems and haikus try to idolize those who are suicidal or suffer from intrusive thoughts. What’s even more disturbing is that some of these posts can be found under the tags of “aesthetic” and/or “inspiration” when the things that they’re talking about are anything but.
Glorifying mental illnesses on social media, which is unequivocally overrun with impressionable young teenagers, is dangerous on various degrees. Not only does it grossly misrepresent the severity of the problem, it may as well lead to the youngins wanting to have a mental disorder. This only gets worse when they come across a Twitter thread by an Instagram self care account titled “Signs you might have anxiety” and mis-diagnose themselves which, again, becomes a whole new issue. The ones who have probably been hit the worst are those who do have actual,
professionally diagnosed mental illnesses. Due to the over glamorising, quite a few people now believe that someone who says that they’re not feeling well are probably just saying so for attention or to be “trendy”. Mentally ill people have caught word of this and as a result, they may be more reluctant to open up. Not only does this help nobody, it sets the discussion of mental health issues back by decades.
The thing is, no one in their right mind should ever go around thinking that depression is a trend these days or anorexia is the new craze. The World Health Organization states that you’d find at least one in four people with a mental disorder. And the fact that these peoples’ struggles are shown in a glamorous fashion over the internet is not a good thing.
Being the new generation, we should take it upon ourselves to educate our younger peers about the dangers of glorifying mental illnesses. We can’t solve the entirety of the problem by ourselves but just explaining this topic to someone whom you saw propagating these ideas is a step in the right direction.
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