Depression is not a trend, it’s an illness.
This is something that I’ve seen everywhere—in news articles, all over social media, in poems. It’s everywhere but is most popular on Tumblr, a site that lets people effortlessly share pictures, words, and videos. Tumblr has gained more and more population over the nine years it has been in action but has proven to be used at times for the wrong reasons.
People on social media, with Tumblr being the popular one, glorify depression by calling it names such as “beautiful suffering” and don’t seem to grasp that this is not beautiful suffering but life-threatening sadness.
Tumblr has over 140 million blogs, and there are all different types of blogs: fashion, photography, music, and different kinds of disorders. Laura U., a 16-year-old girl at an international school in Paris, spoke out about her feelings connected to the pictures of self-harm she saw on Tumblr. “Even those people who are ‘wannabe depressed’ still feel the same emotions. It’s dangerous to talk about ‘wannabe depressives’ because we don’t know for a fact that they are in fact wannabes,” Laura said. “There are a lot of people that suffer.” Photographs of emaciated women with quotes such as, “So it’s OK for you to hurt me, but I can’t hurt myself?” and "I want to die a lovely death,” pasted over their bodies are the types of images that try to make such terrible words look and sound poetic and beautiful.
However, I hope we can all agree that there isn’t anything poetic, beautiful, or good about someone wanting to starve, harm, or kill themselves. Dr. Stan Kutcher, an adolescent psychiatry expert and the Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health, says that “people use the word ‘depression’ if they can’t find their keys, or if they've had a fight with their mother or father, or if they’ve had an argument with their boyfriend or girlfriend, if they didn’t make the school team or didn’t do well on an exam. When we use the word ‘depression’ for every negative emotional state, the word loses its meaning.”
This is one of the most important aspects to this issue. I know I’m guilty of doing the same at times, as are most of us, but it is still something to be cautious about. “Tumblr was, at the start, a photography and art website,” Laura says. “If you link that together with depression blogs, you end up with a glorification of these conditions. There’s definitely a growing community of people feeding off of each other’s strong emotions, and it’s definitely visible online.” People with depression tend to gravitate not to people who are happy, but to other people that share this depression with them, and they latch onto them, sometimes dragging the other person down further with them. I am in no way trying to undermine depression, try to tell people that they are not suffering from it or that is isn’t as big of a deal as people make it out to be.
One in every eight teenagers have gone through or is going through depression. However, it is wrong and insulting to try and make depression, anxiety, self-harm, or eating disorders look beautiful to the outside world. There is nothing beautiful about blood rushing from your veins because of yourself. Nothing about forcing yourself not throw up or not eat is beautiful. It isn’t cool or cute or trendy to cry yourself to sleep every night. It’s just sad. Nothing but sad.
