Depression Memes

In the vast world of internet humor, one of the seemingly endless categories is that of depression memes. As a tool for self-deprecation and isolationist feelings, these shitposts appeal to the masses in a strange yet semi-understandable way.

If you’re not quite sure what I’m talking about, here are some examples:

They’re funny, of course. It’s dark humor – but a brand of dark humor that appeals to nearly everyone.

And I would say this is an overall good thing, but only to a point.

Let’s start with the good: people talk about mental health now. Which to some people, that’s literally life-saving.

Half a century ago, asylums existed as a permanent home for anyone that a family just found too troublesome to hideaway in their own home. From the neurodivergent to the severe mental illness patients, these mental health hospitals were a terrible and terrifying place to simply await death. Mental health was a medical field rife with little-talked-about horrors. Today, asylums are just a category of a themed haunted house. However, in the past, these places were over-crowded facilities that were the forefront of eugenics, scientific experimentations (like lobotomies), and littered with abuses on basically every conceivable level.

(Not so fun fact: in Nazi Germany, concentration and death camps originally started with mental patients. It began as a way to weed out the undesirables, later the name given to Jewish people.)

(Not so fun fact 2: there was a traveling “Loboto-Mobile” where the inventor of the lobotomy would travel around and do public displays of his new medical technique. He even made a game out of it and timed himself on how fast he could shove an icepick into a “patient’s” brain.)

So, yeah, being able to talk about mental health sure has come a long fucking way.

But, maybe it’s gone too far?

(To be clear: the following is not a rant about whywe have depression memes. That’s a social theory rant for perhaps another day.)

What depression memes mean is not really a normalization of mental health, but something I would call a hyper-normalization. These images extend past the realities of mental health; they often go into a way of trying to seem cool by saying, “lol same.”

Ask a person with a mental illness if they have ever had their illness romanticized. Every single one of them will tell you yes.

Self-diagnoses are flourishing, and all this does is takeaway from the actual experiences of those with living with a mental illness.

People talk about their anxiety to a degree in which it’s almost indistinguishable from what a person with an anxiety or panic disorder experiences. And that’s not because they are the same. It’s because the conversations have become so trivial and common. The fears and trepidations of crowds, public speaking, talking to strangers, or a litany of other common things that illicit anxiety are, well, real. They are. But, an anxiety disorder is also real, and it’s also way worse than the nerves people get.

Depression is not feeling down about a breakup. That’s sadness. Depression is an all-consuming apathy, hopelessness, and detachment.

What depression memes do is muddy the waters of those conversations.

Are they bad? Not really.

Will I get mad if you send me them? No.

But should we be more honest that mental health is a term that can be taken over for the sake of getting a laugh? Yes.

Mental health and mental illness are different, and memes don’t really play into the subtleties of that conversation that needs to happen.

Is it important to take care of your mental health and have a support system in place even if you don’t have a diagnosed illness? Yes, of course.

But is it important to understand having emotions and nerves don’t make you a person with an illness? Absolutely vital.

The conversations we as a society can have about mental health are incredibly important and impressive based on our history. But, talking about mental health should come with some deeper understandings . . . perhaps a little bit of seriousness because it’s, well, serious.

Mental health encompasses us all.

Mental illness doesn’t.

I guess I’m saying share your memes, have a laugh, but maybe think about it a little.

I’m not saying there is nothing funny about mental illness. For fucks sake, I told you about smelling my ex on an annoyingly regular basis. It’s okay to laugh at these things.

Just be careful of making it all a laughing matter.

As long as you take interest and care of the people you know that suffer from a mental illness, I guess it’s all better if we can have a good laugh.