Mental health has been becoming much less of a taboo topic. Whether it’s your favorite celebrities on social media or some of the most engrossing Netflix shows, it wouldn’t be surprising if you’ve noticed an uptick in mental-health-related messages and content. However, that doesn’t mean that there haven’t been some unintended negative consequences --specifically romanticization of mental health.
Don’t let the word fool you. You may be getting good vibes from it due to “romanticization” being similar to the word “romance,” but in reality, it’s a highly harmful practice. Let me give you an example. Just this past week, one of my classmates said, “Depression 100, and my life is depression, let’s go!” while smiling and chuckling. Unfortunately, I can give you a personal example as well. I’ve told a couple of my friends before that I’m suffering from depression despite not being officially diagnosed and not having severe-enough symptoms. To give you the straight-up definition, to romanticize something is defined by Merriam-Webster as “to think about or describe something as being better or more attractive or interesting than it really is.”
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In the context of mental health, romanticization could easily occur by carelessly throwing around words and phrases associated with the topic in conversations and on the Internet. At my academically competitive high school, some students have some twisted sense that “depression” or “anxiety” is somehow glorious and desirable, as shown by how they utter statements like, “I’m sooo depressed,” in boastful tones. I believe that in their minds, associating such words with themselves is a way to show off their academic “prowess” or “diligence,” when in most cases, they’re using such words inappropriately. According to the NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health), “[A]nxiety disorders involve more than temporary worry or fear. For a person with an anxiety disorder, the anxiety does not go away and can get worse over time. The symptoms can interfere with daily activities…” As can be seen, to have an anxiety disorder, one must be having the anxiety to a persistent and pervasive level, something that stressing out before a test, even a big one, does not qualify you for.
Platforms like Buzzfeed and a host of other online quiz sites and Internet forums haven’t helped any either. Quiz titles like, “How depressed/sad are you?” have, yes, spread mental health awareness to a degree but in a wrong way. They’ve basically attached attractiveness to a mental health issue, romanticizing it. An offshoot negative effect of such quizzes has been self-diagnosing and self-reporting mental health conditions such as depression. This is a disservice to those who actually suffer from those conditions and in fact, gives false pictures about mental health that can be even more harmful than not being aware of topics related to it in the first place.
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Other notable sources of mental health romanticization is TV and even the news. When Kate Spade, an American fashion designer and founder of the brand Kate Spade, died by suicide in 2018, many headlines “focused on the act rather than the death,” as written by NAMI. In this way, an element of attractiveness, as awful as it sounds, was attached to Spade’s death and as a result, the mental health issues that led to it. Even more concerningly, the popular Netflix series 13 Reasons Why features and makes the story of a main character who dies by a planned suicide engaging when in reality, this is rare (NAMI).
The seriousness of this issue, though, cannot be understood without examining its many harmful effects. A variety of mental health conditions can easily become normalized, and going back to one of the previous topics explored by Forever Blooming, therapy can be seen as ineffective and useless because mental health issues are seen as something embedded within people that cannot be changed. With the digital age and the Internet, content, such as memes, that romanticizes mental health can spread like wildfire, but that doesn’t mean that technology and the net should be our enemy. We can use the same platform to spread factual and informative materials around mental health.
Overall, the romanticization of mental health seems to be a growing and increasingly pressing problem. The bottom line is that as a society, we should make moves to destigmatize mental health. However, it is crucial to not cross the line into romanticizing mental health issues, and instead, we should treat such issues with the gravity and seriousness that they require.
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