Mental Illness – An Unlikely Romance

Stopping the stigma of mental illness is not only by acknowledging its existence, but also by refraining from self-diagnosing normal behaviors.

Social Media has some sort of “Bleaching Effect” where it makes dark issues seem brighter than snowflakes and simpler than they actually are, until you get up-close and realize all its complexities. When I say brighter, I say it with irony; the irony of transforming a debilitating and dark state of mind into something so fashionably desirable, or in other words, romanticized.

It has become trendy to self-diagnose oneself as depressed if you’re sad after a certain event, OCD when you organize the items on your desk, paranoid when you’re suspicious, and having a mental breakdown when you lose your patience. Mental illness terms have become adjectives to describe normal behaviors and emotions, when in reality they are labels of complex behaviors that have surfaced due to a series of unpleasant events, unhealthy coping methods/thought processes, or chemical imbalances that require Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) by trained professionals, mood-stabilizers and anti-psychotic medicines for some.

Andrew Solomon, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University Medical Center, who is suffering from clinical depression himself, wrote in his book The Noonday Demon about depression:

“When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connections to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. If one imagines a soul of iron that weathers with grief and rusts with mild depression, then major depression is the startling collapse of the whole structure.”

In another account, a close friend of mine, after she suffered a mental breakdown due to her depression, described her art (Figure1) as an expression of her scattered and foggy thoughts that were rushing at an unpredictable and aggressive rate. She said: “it seemed as though all the nerves in my brain were disturbed and couldn’t be maintained” Her sense of self felt “exhausted and lost.”

On 28 March 1941, Virginia Woolf drowned herself after many years of struggling with bipolar disorder or manic-depressive disorder, a mental health condition that causes extreme mood swings that include emotional highs (mania or hypomania) and lows (depression)[i], wrote in her suicide note to her husband where her hopelessness and pain were completely self-evident:

“I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate… You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you.”

The heavy burden those suffering from mental illness feel goes far beyond the simplicity and shallowness of social media trends. It is socially disturbing to think that one’s everyday struggle is a trendy hashtag, which can further increase the stigma of mental health illness and the pursuit of treatment. The experience of suicidality is a trendy joke after a bad day, and bipolar highs and lows make for a good meme.

Stopping the stigma of mental illness is not only by acknowledging its existence, but also by refraining from self-diagnoses for the sake of trends and seeming more interesting by exaggerating one’s state of mind. We can be sad without labeling ourselves #depressed, we can be organized without having #OCD, and we can lose our patience without it being a mental breakdown.

References:

[i] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/bipolar-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20355955