Nowadays, everybody has heard the term ‘mental illness’ or ‘mental health’ somewhere. Everybody knows that it’s real, and that it’s just as important as physical health. I am not alone in thinking about mental health, or mental illness: the media, too, depicts it. Sometimes, though, the media doesn’t get it quite right.
If you open up Pinterest, you can write anything in the search bar and just tack on the word ‘aesthetic’ to find results. Even searching phrases such as ‘pain aesthetic’ or ‘sad girl aesthetic’ will garner results: photos of smudged eyeliner and movie quotes and girls with their faces in pillows. Frequently if you open up the images you can see the person who’s pinned it has written the word aesthetic in the caption to the photo. How can a picture of someone’s pain or someone’s mental illness be aesthetic? Why are we glorifying these conditions in this way?
13 reasons why
Likewise, the media frequently has distorted depictions of mental illness, consciously or unconsciously framing them as a glorified aesthetic. One such example is the TV show 13 Reasons Why. The show’s original aim appeared to be emphasising speaking up if you feel like you’re battling a war in your head. The show featured a few scenes that were actually eventually removed from the show for being too disturbing — I recall classmates retelling stories where they were actually physically sick upon completing certain episodes. Beyond this, however, the New York Times has reported that multiple mental health experts have called the show’s depiction of suicide and mental illness inaccurate. They were also called possibly dangerous.
In this vein, it is true that one Australian child committed suicide in the same way the protagonist did in the show, in what was termed a copycat suicide. Of course, this is not necessarily wholly correlated with the show — the child did struggle with mental health issues already, but no doubt there was at least some influence, even if very little, from the show, given the way the child died. The show has been accused of glamorising suicide and mental pain, contributing, perhaps, to the epidemic of mental illness as an aesthetic both in the media and in the world.
tragedies and tracing the past
Of course, there has always been pain in stories and the media as a whole. Early forms of literature were steeped in tragedies, for example in plays like Oedipus Rex. The whole point of a tragedy is to create a feeling of catharsis in their audience, which can be categorised as a form of pain. The pain is meant to be meaningful and emulates the pain that the tragic characters are in. What the people on the page or stage feel, you feel too.
Is this not entirely dissimilar to how the media portrays poor mental health or mental illness? We see what the protagonists of these shows go through, and the pain that they feel, and then we feel it, too. It is interesting how we have gone from feeling catharsis from protagonists falling in love with their mother and killing their own father to attacking their own mind. Features of Oedipus’ dilemma were internal — it is all about his own ego, after all — but the recent shift fully into the internal is intriguing.
tumblr and backlash
The problem, though, is when the aestheticization comes into it, and the internal conflict of the characters is presented in a way that can lessen the reality of it, or glorify it. Before, villains tended to have mental illness, whilst now it is our protagonists — but as such, it tends to be glossed over. Online, particularly in the tumblr era of our world — as well as, still, to some extent, now — poor mental health or perhaps even mental illness was treated as a quirk. Tumblr was most popular in 2014, with the show 13 Reasons Why coming out in 2017.
For the most part, there has been a backlash on this glorification and aestheticised version of mental illness, most potently in our time. The last few years have seen a change in some of the presentation of mental health and illness, with these words becoming more common and comprehensible. Additionally, there has been an increase in the postings of teachers in schools who act as support for mental health or wellness.
Aside from this, though, the discourse online is convoluted. There are viral TikTok videos detailing generic signs of certain mental illnesses, often wording these signs so that they are much more applicable to the average person. These people tend to not have qualifications in anything to do with the mental illness or wellness as a whole, and frequently do not have the mental illness in question either. Of course it is good to have more awareness of these illnesses, but in this way it is generally used for clout. There is also an aspect of romanticisation within these videos, and even in the online discourse in general. People are self-diagnosing more than ever, with more and more TikTok comments on these videos stating that users wish they had these illnesses. There is such a thing as a ‘sad girl persona’ going around these circles wherein people glorify being mentally unwell and aspire to be sad constantly.
The Aesthetic of ‘Female Rage’ and its Connection to Mental Illness
Women have a lot to be angry about.
In general, when women are violent in literature or in the media, it is because they have been wronged by men. Medea is a great historic example of this. Typically, women’s rage and violence is also linked to childrearing. Women attack when their child is in danger, even if they have been passive before. Presenting women in this violent light is a version of female empowerment, a form of backlash against the passivity of women in past media.
There also tends to be a fear of the female body that pervades these films and books. Teeth, for example, depicts a vagina with teeth. Likewise, films such as Jennifer’s Body displays a seductive woman who turns out to be not so sweet as one might have thought.
While these are general trends, there was a recent spike in what is known as female rage reads — books that centre around female rage and its impacts. Some books associated with this trend include Animal by Lisa Taddeo, and Boy Parts by Eliza Clark. Within some of these books, and other media within the trend, is a link between the protagonist and mental illness.
Animal, for instance, attempts to address the way sexual trauma lasts with women and makes them violent. I found it a horrifying read and vehemently disliked it. The protagonist is fixated on sex and it is all she thinks about. As a result, the power her character might have had is dulled by her poor mental health and fixation on her past trauma, as she never progresses beyond it and remains one dimensional. The way the book dissociates from its own events and has a never-ending, overarching pulse of pain within it desensitises the reader to the plot and themes. Consequently, the aesthetic of the angry, violent woman is still linked inexplicably to sex — in this case, to the trauma of the act — and any attempt to move beyond it is void.
In this manner, female rage as an aesthetic becomes linked with mental illness, which ends up being a paradox of what it was attempting to do. Female empowerment is turned on its head; violent women originally created to oppose passivity have their actions almost excused or removed from them by their link to mental illness. They are not truly angry: they are just mentally ill.
closing thoughts
Overall, the presentation of mental illness in the general media is certainly a work in progress. While I am glad we have come so far in addressing the topic, there needs to be more work on how it is presented and toeing the line between awareness and promotion of mental illness.
If you or anyone else you know needs support, there are a lot of resources out there.
- Find more articles through https://www.hercampus.com/wellness/mental-health/
- National Sexual Assault Hotline (1.800.656.HOPE) – American hotline
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1.800.273.TALK ) – American hotline
- 9-8-8: Suicide Crisis Helpline in Canada