Promotion of Mental Illness in Social Media
Nowadays, just about every juvenile will be on their phone. They’ll be scrolling through Snapchat, updating their Instagram, or playing a game online. In the same way people use technology to have fun or communicate with friends, it can also be used for many as a method of venting — a way to find comfort and solace for people who have none. It sounds innocent enough, but what was once relief has distorted into a highly contagious sickness. Even worse, the victims of this illness infect themselves willingly.
For example, Tumblr. What was once an innocent blogging site has been infected with the undying promotion of mental illness. It’s on every post, update, and tag, knowingly or not: Anorexia blogs who post “thinspo,” images of girls with too-thin stomachs and mascara-ran faces. The growing trend of teenagers, barely children, stating they wish for death. It’s a joke, supposedly, an exaggeration of “millennial humor.” (The fact that such gruesomely morbid jokes are considered child-appropriate nowadays is a discussion for another time.) Not to mention, of course, the growing disdain for neurotypical people — those without mental illness– enough to the point where the phrase has a nasty connotation. One might perceive being called neurotypical as an insult, and no one can blame them when there are multiple blogs dedicated entirely to them and their supposed ignorance.
This isn’t to say those who suffer from mental illness are not allowed to feel irritation or exhaustion with the occasionally uninformed things neurotypicals say. But the promotion of it, the view that lacking a mental illness makes someone dull, ignorant, or unworthy of attention is harmful. Many children who could have had a smooth ride in life have made it unnecessarily difficult for themselves in an attempt to separate themselves from that stereotype.
It, for many people, can be an unfortunately familiar story: the child came across content promoting mental illness and applied these characteristics to themselves. The child will make themselves depressed, they will convince themselves that they are ill in the same manner as either the character or the idea they so idolize is. Eventually, the child can truly make themselves sick– and it’s not so easy to fix.
Children who have infected themselves desire to feel “abnormal.” They desire to stand out, to be unique, to be just like the pretty crying girls they see dozens of times a day. They want to get comments on their posts supporting them: Strangers telling them that they’re beautiful and valuable and giving them attention. It’s undoubtedly tied to the massive amounts of social media they intake, the same way a little girl might see a supermodel and try to change how they act. Humans, especially children, mimic in an attempt to develop themselves. When they see the promotion of harmful behaviors, they will insert these ideas into their personality.
What does this mean? This unnerving trend shows no sign of stopping. What was a millennial fad has dripped down into the newer Generation Z: for they are absorbing the same content millennials give out. It is the responsibility of the older generations to train the newer ones, to support them. In the face of children who have decided their lives are already over because it makes them special, in the face of children who sing songs of suicide on their way to their middle school classroom: they’ve failed.
