When I was 13 years old, I created my first Tumblr account. I still have it to this day and it has changed my life in so many ways. I'm completely comfortable showing it to people now, but five years ago? Not so much. It was my own little secret. But, I kept it a secret because I saw something on there that made a bad impression on me, and it was something I felt I could never tell anyone.
If you've ever been on Tumblr, or any social media site really, you've probably noticed that sometimes people post pictures that are meant to be sort of... depressing. I bet you're picturing some in your head right now. I still remember the first time I ever saw a picture of someone who self-harmed. I was only 13, like I said, and I had never even heard of people doing that before. But, that picture has stuck with me forever. It was a black and white photo, seemingly of a girl in a bathtub with a razor in one hand and slits down her wrist on the other arm.
After that experience, I began to see more and more pictures of girls who had harmed themselves or were suffering from some sort of "trendy" mental illness. Many girls that I came to befriend personally online would post pictures of their ribs and they would tell me how many days they've only had water and saltines to eat. And me being impressionable and naive, I thought that was cool. Destructive tendencies became a normal thing to me. I saw it everywhere, every day. I don't see it as often now because I've weeded out the blogs who glorified mental illness, but I guarantee that it's still there.
Let's do an experiment and try image googling "depressed". These are the results I got:
These are pretty normal, not surprising pictures. These are maybe what you'd see in a prescription medication commercial, or in a magazine.
But let's see how things change when we add "Tumblr" to that. Here are the results for "Depressed Tumblr":
Below are graphic images that could trigger some individuals. NSFW.
And these pictures are only the tip of the iceberg of a problem we have on social media. We live in a new world that glorifies self-harm and mental illness. And for impressionable 13-year-olds like me, I wanted to be like these people. I wanted to get the likes and reblogs. I wanted to have a bunch of followers that loved me. Thankfully, I never succumbed to the temptation of glorifying self-harm.
The reason why I never gave in was because I had a close friend who self-harmed, and she was super ashamed of it. She never wanted to show anyone and she didn't show me for years that she was struggling with self-harm and bulimia also.
That's when I realized that it's not as cool as I thought it was and that there are people out there who are ashamed of self-harming. Putting a negative influence on the world by saying that self-harm is cool does nobody any good at all.
I have no doubt that all of these people who glorify self-harm genuinely struggle with it, and use reblogs and likes to cope with the pain. But, it is not worth making a harmful impression on the impressionable, because their life could be more at risk because of it.
Also, I'm not ragging solely on Tumblr. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Instagram all have this issue too. This is a web-wide epidemic, and if we want a better future for those struggling with mental illness, then we need to stop glorifying it. We need to get better together.
