Tumblr; whether you love it, hate it, or could care less you’ve probably stumbled over it at one point in time or another. It is definitely an enticing website, a place where you can blog and connect with other people that share your interests. I know that I’m for sure guilty of hitting the re-blog button way into the early hours of the night. Though if you’re one of those people that just have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s what you need to know about Tumblr.

Tumblr is a blogging website that was created in 2007 by David Karp and was then bought by Yahoo in 2013. Tumblr is a place where you can express yourself and create all types of media for your blog, from pictures to text posts to videos. By following other user’s blogs their posts will show up on your dashboard, where you can re-blog their media thus letting it show up on your own blog. It’s pretty fun, I mean, who doesn’t love sharing videos of dogs playing with babies and pictures of lavender colored roses? Although famous for its NSFW content controversy, Tumblr hosts a variety of different interesting, to say the least, posts.

Contrary to the likes versus dislikes of Tumblr, a bigger question stands; Is Tumblr a facilitator of Depression or is it a cure to those plagued by mental illness? When scrolling down your dashboard on Tumblr you’re likely to encounter a plethora of different things. From cute kittens to sad poems to gooey mac & cheese all the way to a nude woman with her legs spread wide. It’s easy to scroll quickly past the X-rated materials, but for people with depression and anxiety how easy is it to scroll past the bloody wrists and poems expressing little desire to continue on with life?

Being that I myself struggle with anxiety I tend to scroll past these types of posts, knowing that it is something I do not need in my head. I’m one of those people who finds hope in Tumblr and it’s uplifting quotes that tell me tomorrow will be a brighter day. When I went through my first break-up, Tumblr was a website I visited frequently, loving the fact that other people on the website shared my feelings and they spoke with strength and tales of moving forward. In more ways than one Tumblr was a place of solace for me because it gave me a lot of things to relate to and helped relieve my depression.

Oppositely, one of my close friends deals with on-going depression and she stays far away from Tumblr. She said that the images of despair and the people that shared her feelings pulled her deeper into the black hole she resided in. She deleted her Tumblr and never remade it. My friend, among many others that surf Tumblr, suffer in silence feeding their dark thoughts while scrolling through blogs, closed off in their dark bedrooms.

While every good thing has its bad side and every person has a right to freedom of expression, should Tumblr continue to allow dark, violent posts on their website? Do these types of websites contribute to further stressing out the already anxious millennial generation? As I enjoy Tumblr, being someone who struggles with anxiety has opened my eyes to the feelings that you think you will never get out of and this is not something that needs to be fed by outside influences; your brain feeds it enough on its own.