I like to think of myself as a jokester. If you think horrible and extremely corny jokes are hilarious, you'd think so, too. But I never once made fun of someone's pain to make another person laugh. That's why it is so appalling to me to see people joking about suicide and different mental illnesses on social media.
Throughout my high school years, I have always heard people say "I'm going to kill myself because of this homework." or "This drama is giving me so much anxiety!" and it's definitely not okay. I could lie and say I've never said things like this, but that's not me. Before my sophomore year, before I actually went through the thoughts and feelings of someone with a mental illness, I didn't understand how it felt. But now that I've been through that horrible period of my life, I can understand why we shouldn't be openly saying these phrases.
Since Twitter is my favorite social media website, I spend most of my free time scrolling up and down my timeline. Over the past few weeks, I've been noticing a huge blow up of people saying things along the lines of "killing myself" or "this gives me OCD!!!" Suicide is not a joke. Mental illnesses are not comical. Twitter should not be a place to openly play these things off as jokes. Honestly, we shouldn't even be saying them in person, either, but it's important to watch what you say on social media because, let's be real: you don't know all the people you follow on a deep, personal level. You have no idea what these people go through on a daily basis.
The big question is: why don't people see how serious mental illness is? The only reasonable excuse would be that it's hard to understand what it's like if it isn't experienced firsthand. Since people don't really think about the harsh realities of suicidal thoughts or other mental illnesses, it's hard for them to put themselves in the shoes of someone who has experienced that. It's easy for someone to sympathize with the pain of someone with cancer, but to have a sickness that's in your brain and thoughts is just incomprehensible to a lot of people. Yes, a lot of people understand that depression makes you sad and suicidal people don't want to be here anymore and people with anxiety disorders are always "on edge", but they don't understand it to the fullest extent.
Suicide isn't the only thing people make fun of on social media. The tweet above is just one of many that make fun of different mental disorders. How is having two different aesthetics in any relation to having dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder)? There is no relation to those two things. It's not fair to people who might have this disorder. It's not fair to make them feel like their illness is just a joke to explain Instagram posts. Some of the replies on the tweet were reasonable: "This is not funny. why are you making fun of an actual disorder?", but the majority of the replies were: "it's just a joke, people. relax." How can you take something serious like this in such a light matter?
I guess it's just gotten easier to nonchalantly say "I'm going to kill myself" or make jokes about having anxiety, but we need to find alternatives to these phrases. It's not fair to stigmatize mental illness even further than it already is by tweeting things like this. Respect others feelings and think before you post. You never know who's reading your tweets.