Mental Illness Communities: How Social Media Groups Harm Their Members and Evade Deletion
My experience with Tumblr and Instagram in the 2010s and today.
CW: disordered eating, suicidal ideation, suicide, and self-harm. If you or someone you know needs help, call The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800–273-TALK (8255).
My disordered eating started because of social media.
I joined Instagram when I was 10, and quickly fell into communities that glamorized mental illness.
People say that a lot, now. If a character in a show is depressed, you’ll hear someone accusing the show of glamorizing depression. Maybe it is.
But the communities I saw when I joined social media were not subtle. They focused on an aesthetic that could be best described as “tragically beautiful”. No one was saying that eating disorders, or more broadly mental illness, was fun, per se, but it was seen as deep. Meaningful, somehow, in a way that happiness wasn’t. We were all trying to make the best of a terrible situation: we were looking for an upside to all the downsides of mental illness.
I would see poem upon poem about being depressed, about suicide, about self-harm. I would see friendships revolve around discussions of self-harm…
