We Need To Stop Making A Joke of Mental Health

Mental health is not something to be taken lightly.  Bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, drug abuse, the list goes on; and these are real problems that real people deal with on a daily basis.  In recent years, for whatever reason, these disorders have started to become a joke.  I’ve seen people post pictures of pills filled with glitter, tweets that say things about spiraling into depression because of something menial, and just today a girl I follow on Instagram posted a selfie with the caption “Pain is the only thing that makes me feel alive.”  

Now certainly, I don’t know what every person is going through or what they could be feeling, but I’m sure most of the people who post and repost these things don’t actually have the problems they’re describing.  Which means that the people who do have these problems are losing their validity.  

I personally have overcome anxiety, and I have a real emotional support animal who helped me to do so.  When I say that my dog is an emotional support animal, most people think I just fudged a doctor’s note so my landlords couldn’t say no to him living with me.  While I did get the doctor’s note for that reason and so that it was all documented, I do actually need my dog for the support he gives me.  As more and more people are learning that pets classified as emotional support animals aren’t legally allowed to be turned down by landlords, more and more people are getting their pets falsely labeled as such.  This then downgrades my actual need for my dog.  Where is the credibility or legitimacy if everyone can say their dog is an emotional support animal? I’ll admit that my anxiety starts to feel invalidated when someone starts to take advantage of the abilities and privileges that come with having an emotional support or service animal.  

The idea of suicide is becoming dramatically romanticized and invalidated too.  A tweet just came up on my timeline of a magazine headline reading: “Study reveals that listening to music too loudly can kill you,” and the next picture is of the volume icon on a phone with the volume all the way up even past the edge of the screen.  Of the 1.4 thousand people who retweeted it, and the 2.4 thousand who liked it, who has actually had ideas about committing suicide?  Perhaps because so many people jokingly say they want to kill themselves, the people who really do consider it don’t say anything, for fear of not being taken seriously.  Which is obscene—at the darkest time in someone’s life, they are afraid to ask for help because they think whoever they tell will think they’re just kidding or just “doing it for the likes,” like a meme on social media.

Drug abuse and alcoholism are becoming more of a joke to people as well.  There is an ongoing meme around social media of “Just something to take the edge off.”  Some of the pictures that I’ve seen with this caption are of a martini glass filled with macaroni, an edited picture of a mug and a K-Cup with the Clorox bleach logo on each, and someone holding a metal fork like a cigarette in front of an electrical outlet.  Yes, I did chuckle at this meme in the beginning, but then I started thinking of the individuals who actually do consider hurting themselves, either with drugs, alcohol, or even a fork in an electrical outlet.  And I started thinking of their families and friends.  Do these people’s loved ones realize that they need help?  Do the families have any clue about what these individuals are thinking about?  How can someone tell the people that they love about how they may have considered doing things like this, when it is constantly made a joke of in today’s world?

Suicide, mental health, and drug abuse are very real and serious things, and and they are things that are hardly ever taken seriously among our generation.  All too often, people will tweet or post on social media with the intent to get likes and retweets, at the cost of joking about incredibly serious issues.  This is a problem because there are people out there who really do have these issues and deal with them on a daily basis.  And they don’t ask for help because of the stigma that comes with it: they’re overreacting or just joking or don’t really mean it.  How can someone ask for help in a society that continuously makes jokes of life altering issues?  Next time you say, “OMG, killing myself” over something that didn’t quite go your way, or joke about drinking bleach or overdosing or harming yourself, consider just who might really be hurting in these ways, and how your humor may affect them.