We see in a lot of the romance movies or books today the main character that suffers and the other character miraculously brings them out of the darkness and makes everything better.
The main character usually suffers from depression due to a bad family, a broken heart, an illness or they just outright have it. Then, the secondary character comes into their life and somehow cures their depression. And their romance is cherished and wanted until the next cookie cutter movie comes out.
Wait- wanted?
Yes, wanted.
Since these books and movies have started to come out, people are jealous of the relationship of the two characters, and they want it themselves. There are people that claim that they are depressed or will fake self-harm just so that they can be a part of this fairy-tale life and maybe have a knight in shining armor.
People pretend to have a bad home life. They criticize their parents to their friends, whenever, their parents give them anything they want and don't question it. They'll pretend that their parents are getting a divorce, but their parents are still together for years later and show no signs of splitting.
It had gotten to the point that no one takes mental illnesses seriously. People will pose in pictures with either fake blood or ketchup on their wrists and add a silly caption to make fun of people that self-harm. People tell those with depression that they need to just not be sad or that they need to be thankful for what they do have because it could be worse.
No one needs validation that a situation could be worse. They just need help to improve so that the bad situation doesn't get worse.
The moment that we stop romanticizing these stories, mental illnesses will start to be taken more seriously again.
There is almost never a "Prince Charming" that can fix all of your issues and pull you miraculously out of a depression or some other type of serious mental illness.
This doesn't just happen in books either. It is famously well known that there is a huge following for depression related pages on tumblr, twitter or even a personal blog.
People like to read or watch other people suffer, even if the suffering is from a mental illness. The people running these blogs (not all of them, but a fair amount) are perfectly aware of this and fake mental illnesses just to have a following.
Since their mental illnesses are fake, they never need to seek help, therefore, their blog lives forever stuck in depression.
And because of issues like these, everyone is quick to self-diagnose. Some people might just be going through a depressive episode, which is not the same thing as depression, and they are so quick to judge it.
People start to think that it is normal to be depressed or have these issues, so they openly talk about it, not caring if there are people around that could actually be depressed.
It invalidates the seriousness of depression.
No one should want to have depression in order to get a guy (or girl), to be pitied or to get attention.
Depression is serious, and it is time to treat it as such.
