Using Mental Illnesses as Adjectives

You may have seen this poster around on the internet: I certainly have, countless times. Yet it seems with thousands of “notes” on Tumblr, the message still isn’t getting across to us as a society.

So, simply why are mental illnesses used as adjectives?

Saying that someone “looks so Anorexic” or that your “OCD is coming out again” is just wrong. Looking like a mental illness is not possible. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is just that: a compulsion and an overwhelming need to do something that doesn’t just go away and come back. Depression does not appear for one day then lift as if it were a momentary haze. It is all consuming.

How would you feel if you were sitting on the bus and someone made a distracted comment that “the weather today is so cancer”? Disgusted? What about if someone were to say that “the weather today is so depressing”. Would you even acknowledge it? It is the SAME.

Think about if someone asked you “what have you got to be so asthmatic about?” but yet we can ask “what have you got to be so depressed about?” or “why don’t you just eat?” Mental illnesses are as important as and perhaps even more severe than physical illnesses. They consume and take lives. Anorexia kills more people than some forms of cancer. Suicide remains the most common cause of death in men under 35, with 90% of people having committed suicide able to be diagnosed with a form of mental illness.

So why is it so often is disregarded?

I can’t even begin to describe how many times I have heard these comments carelessly thrown around in day to day life.

You “almost had a panic attack”? Did you? Really?

You almost lost control of all of your senses including your own bladder control. You were sweating and violently shaking. You were wheezing as tears burned in your eyes and the room span around you. You felt as though you were actually going to pass out or die. Really? Well I face this every single day, time after time for the tiniest things. Sometimes even without a reason.

Take a moment to think before you speak. Seriously.

I sound like a middle aged mother advising her five year old child to stop bullying another. It’s really quite embarrassing that our society needs told.

——

Have you encountered anything like this? I’d love to hear about your own experiences in the comments below.

Promoting and Romantcising Mental Illness (namely Tumblr)

The main objective of this blog, and indeed where the title of itself has been created, is to stop the romanticising of mental illness.

There is a horrible, glamorised version of mental illness in the media: mostly online on blogging platforms such as Tumblr.

In as long ago as 2010 Tumblr had in excess of 169.5 million blogs, with the number continuing to rise each day. I ask you: take a moment to imagine how many there are now… Hopefully this gives you an idea of influential a website like this is to the growing minds of the 14 to 21 year olds (its majority age range) that use it on a daily basis.

In a quote from Mary Schwartz, the true extent of what is happening under our noses to the adolescents of the world is revealed, “[They romanticise] being in an unstable relationship, being an addict, cutting yourself, killing yourself, wanting to kill yourself, hating yourself and being in a mental hospital.”

This seemingly endless list should not exist at all.

On Tumblr being anxious, depressed or in any way mentally ill is often regarded as something mysterious and poetic and a desirable trait to add to your About Me page. The melancholic quotes added to black and white photographs suck people into their grasps and this readily accessible sea of dark poetry could easy drown out those whose suffering has reached a clinical level.

There are photos and moving “gifs” of fresh self-harm; the blood rushing to the surface and dripping onto the floor in an endless loop. Black and white photography of girls whose “thighs never touch” with horrible comments lain over the top. Portions of programmes completely unrelated to sadness and depression, edited so dramatically that that is seemingly all that the programme stood for. Pills in shaking hands. Nooses and razor blades. Empty plates, scales, and tape measures…

“During the years in which teenagers seek out self-affirmation and recognition from others, this new, easy promise of being recognised as strong, beautiful and mysterious by Tumblr “followers” can be very tempting,” says Dr. Mark Reinecke, chief psychologist at North-western Memorial Hospital. This is a professional mental health worker, sharing in the sane opinions of the well minded public.

People begin too pine to be similar to the haunted teens they see before them. They want to fit in. Be part of the competitive illness; seeking to be the best.

At what?

At slowly killing themselves?

At destroying their childhoods through no fault of their own?

I will never understand why people suffering from mental illness would promote the very thing that is destroying them. How could you possibly want others to suffer as you do?

Tips are constantly being exchanged in an attempt to make others more and more ill, disguised as helpful advice. Please; this is not helpful. It is so triggering to sufferers, and even those who do not. You are promoting an ideal that does not exist at all in the world. You are promoting agony and death.

Would you pine to have cancer? Share black and white photos of bald, sunken patients sitting through endless chemotherapy? No. Of course not. That sounds disgusting, right?

Yet it is alright for us to promote eating disorders; when Anorexia Nervosa is proven to kill more people than some CANCERS. That is 1 in 5. How truly beautiful and poetic right? NO. NO. NO.

The above is just an example of one of the tons of mental illnesses and their subtypes being glamorised and glittered.

MAKE IT STOP.

“Oh just get over it, everyone feels *insert emotion*”

Firstly I need to lay the basics down: that mental disorders are just that. Mental disorders. They are not just a processed thought or fleeting emotion. They are all consuming chemical imbalances in the brain causing it to function differently from that of a healthy one. It is technically a physical illness affecting a person’s mental state and well being. It cannot be compared to one of your negative emotions. 

It makes me sick, or even rather disgusted, when people think that a person can choose to develop or even turn off a mental illness/disorder. To tell a person to “just get over it” or to “get a grip” is like telling a cancer patient to “just get rid of it”. 
How about it you were told, or overheard: “Oh just get rid of that terminal illness, you clearly brought it on yourself.” 

Would that make you sick to your stomach? Would that appall the “normal” people of society?

Yet is is alright for you to tell an Anorexic to “just eat” or a person with depression to “just cheer up”. There is an endless list of these pathetic ideas and quotes for each disorder from this society that seems to crave for and idolise mental illness, while at the same time shunning and demeaning those that admit or have discovered that they do suffer from one. 

There are some picture quotes and the realities behind the illnesses here, that I recently found on Pinterest credited to the link below: 

Pictures Are Credited To

        
   
 There are physical chemical imbalances in these disordered brains. There is clear evidence to prove this yet it seems to be so valiantly ignored by society. It’s as though we don’t want to believe someone with a mental illness didn’t choose it, or isn’t just “crazy” and should therefore should be hospitalised and treat worse than a criminal: a claustrophobic padded cell, debilitating straight jacket and electrical impulses shocked through to re-wire the brain. 

Mental illness is NOT a choice. It is serious. It is DEADLY serious. And it is a lot more common than you may realise. It is likely you have heard the statistic of 1 in 4 people suffering from a mental illness at some point in their lives. It seems this is being ignored. And it shouldn’t be. Period. 

A mental illness can develop because of so many reasons, but most likely because the person had a predisposed weakness in them. And they did not chose this. And just as they didn’t initially choose the agony, they cannot just choose to get rid of it. Do you think all the sufferers, emphasis on this word, would willingly spend hours and hours of their lives talking to therapists if there was a quick fix that they had readily built within themselves? Within ourselves, as I too am a sufferer. Just think about that. 

Think about how simply stupid something sounds before you say it. Take a rational step back. A thoughtless remark could actually create a mental illness. That’s how much your words hurt. How indescribably powerful. 

And hopefully my words will have shown you the truth today. 

Thankyou.