Navigating Social Media With Mental Illness

Six years ago I was diagnosed with major depression and generalized anxiety. Neither came as a huge shock to me, as both depression and anxiety have been features of my life for as long as I can remember.

These issues have put my life on pause, leaving me in a constant holding pattern waiting to feel better enough about myself to really start living. I am addressing them comprehensively through a combination of therapy, medication, and lifestyle changes — but it’s slow going.

In the meantime social media has helped provide the social interaction and attention I lack in the rest of my life. Unfortunately, my issues have also impacted how I interact with social media, and over time I’ve developed a number of unhealthy behaviors.

I think the first step to addressing and correcting poor or unhealthy behaviors is recognition. So I’m taking a brutally honest inventory of how I interact with social media in unhealthy ways and how social media may be making me more unhealthy.

Exaggerated Sense of Rejection

Social media, and Twitter in particular, probably isn’t the best place for someone whose feelings are hurt easily. It’s a place that lends itself to broad, sweeping statements and pithy barbs that often aren’t intended with the malice that seems to drip from them.

My anxiety makes me overthink the things people say to me, and running them constantly through my head for hours or days after they’re said. I plumb the depths of every word, searching for some hidden sign of the contempt that I’m sure is there, but of course that rarely is.

My depression works in lock-step with my anxiety, making me assume the absolute worst about every hidden strand I think I unearth from people’s otherwise innocuous, or at worst gently ribbing, statements.

Inappropriate Anger

I think differently than a lot of people on my feeds. I’ve always been attracted to people who look at the world differently than I do. Were I healthy, I think this would be a strength, but when you’re in an emotional state like I often am, it’s like subjecting myself to a constant gauntlet.

I read things about how people like me, or who share some thoughts as me, are bad people. It sticks in my head and makes me second guess everything I say.

Over time I start to feel constrained, and that frustration bubbles up until something sets me off, and I find myself unreasonably angry about some tiny transgression.

It’s a constant cycle of anxiety, self-editing, frustration, anger, and remorse.

Disappearing Acts

As much as I want, and frankly need, social media. It’s a scary place for me. Several times a week I want to destroy everything I’ve ever written, delete my accounts, and disappear.

There are times when total isolation seems preferable to the fear of rejection, the frustration, and the overthinking I subject myself to on an almost daily basis.

When things are going well, I enjoy interacting with people, making jokes, having fun. When they’re not, I feel utter desperation to erase myself from the internet as quickly as possible.

Self-Destruction

One of the worst components of my depression is my belief that I’m a bad person. Logically I don’t think that I am, but in practice it’s hard not to feel that way sometimes. It’s one of the driving factors behind all this overthinking, self-abuse, and occasionally ridiculous behavior.

When I get to a place where I really decide I’m a truly bad person it makes me want to cause suffering. Not to other people, but to myself. I destroy my writing, I block people I like, I say things that I know will make people hate me. It’s awful behavior. Not only awful for me, but for the people who get caught up in my wake.