It’s everywhere. It's those pictures of cuts running up and down someone’s arms, matched to a black-and-white color scheme with some quote about sadness or mystery imprinted across it. It's a tweet or a Facebook status proclaiming that someone is “emo,” “depressed,” or “psycho” as if it’s just a quirk to be celebrated. It's a line in a book or a movie written by an inexperienced writer about how someone suffers through “beautiful pain” as the person undergoes suicidal thoughts. It’s a comment about how people with depression, anxiety, or schizophrenia are “crazy,” “sensitive,” and should “just snap out of it.” It’s something said at a dinner conversation about how “you should date a person with depression—they’re so deep."
I’m done with it. You should be, too.
Tell me how this is something to be used as a joke. The World Health Organization estimates that around 350 million people around the world suffer from depression and that, by 2030, it will become the number one cause of death -- above car accidents, heart disease, and even wars. Schizophrenia causes paranoia and hallucinations. Anxiety inhibits people from doing things that they don’t want to do, and, sometimes, even the things that they do want to do. That’s not all, there are over 200 other classified forms of mental illnesses.
Mental illnesses are not “romantic.” They're not something to laugh about or make fun of. People who suffer from them actually suffer. They are not at all the way they’re depicted in books: dreamy and looking for a special someone to fill a void or politely sad and writing beautiful poems while a single tear rolls down their face once in a while. It is debilitating, affecting the way that people live, think, and act. It ruins relationships and lives if left untreated and leads to deaths.
The problem with romanticizing mental illnesses is that it trivializes them. It depicts them as something that they’re not, implying that they are easy to handle and almost desirable. Young children on social media often come across these posts and get the idea that self-harm is something “cool” to set them apart from the crowd. What these pictures, jokes, and quotes don’t show are the addictive traits of self-harm and how hard it is to stop, along with all of the self-hatred, isolation, and even depression that may follow once self-destructive behavior begins.
People who actually suffer from mental illnesses hear these jokes and see these designs every day. Clothing stores like Urban Outfitters create clothes with “depression” or “eat less" written all over them or poke fun at existing disorders (See also: the “Obsessive Christmas Disorder” sweater sold at Target stores). The problem is that it takes away from how serious these illnesses are and how much they hurt the lives of both people who suffer from them and the people around them. It may be “just a joke” to one person, but it could be a trigger and a source of shame and embarrassment to another.
Why post and repost pictures of self-harm in a positive light? Why post them at all? These pictures can cause people to fall back into addictive behaviors. You may receive a moment of satisfaction that you created a “beautiful picture,” but someone else may look at the picture and be reminded of their own injuries and urge to hurt themselves.
So, before you post that picture, quote that book, or make that joke, even if it is just another minute of social media or a passing comment to you, ask yourself how it affects someone else. Approximately one in five adults in the United States experience a mental illness and the statistics are not much lower for younger people. You never know who you are affecting, but you can control how you want to affect them.
