In 2011, Bell Let’s Talk Day was started by the Bell Media foundation with the intention of destigmatizing the conversation around mental health in everyday life and raising money for mental health initiatives. Every time someone uses the hashtag “BellLetsTalk” on social media, the company donates five cents to initiatives across the country to help more people access mental health aid.
Aside from donating money, the campaign raises awareness about mental health by asking people all over Canada to post under the hashtag on their social media along with a blurb about their experiences with mental illness. The hashtag connects people all over the world and starts a conversation around mental health, educating people on mental illness and having compassion for those who are struggling.
A previous boss of mine was incredibly patient with me as I went through medication adjustments and debilitating anxiety. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a boss like that. Bell Let’s Talk Day can be beneficial for employers who don’t know much about mental illness as it provides an opportunity for education and awareness.
Even though great things have been done and are being done to help people deal with mental illness through this initiative, I also think that Bell Let’s Talk Day contributes to a big problem: the glorification of mental illness.
One can make a simple tweet of “#BellLetsTalk” to support the initiative, but many use the day as an opportunity to share their personal struggles around mental health with their friends and followers on social media. When it first began, it seemed like a good idea to me because people could find encouragement through sharing their story and reading about others’ experiences, but as more and more people share details about their mental health experiences, I’ve been finding it triggering and ineffective.
One in five Canadians will suffer from mental illness in their lifetime. That’s an enormous number of people in our country. With a struggle so common, it makes sense that people would want to talk about it. Often when we share aspects of our lives on social media, it’s the good aspects, like job promotions, marriages, vacations, and children. However, when a friend of mine posts about their luxurious vacation in Vegas, I feel a rush of envy towards them and their life. I’m sure it’s happened to you too. Even if we wish the best for these people, we are still envious of them and the good aspects of their life.
I believe that when we feel vulnerable, we can experience similar feelings of envy towards others when they receive attention, sympathy, and validation for their struggle with mental illness. When someone we follow on social media posts about their struggle with mental illness, the post is often met with comments like, “So proud of you,” and “You are so beautiful, inside and out.” We often feel a bit of envy toward someone’s new car, and we often also feel the sting of envy at the encouragement and attention people get in response to their mental illness — of course we want that too.
This is especially true if we see posts about successfully overcoming or dealing with a mental illness. When we post about our experiences, it’s a polished version of our struggles and it makes them appear attractive and under control to others, even if that’s not the reality. That’s how we become envious of others with mental illnesses: they post something appealing or attention-grabbing, and get that attention, and we want the same thing. Having a mental illness may seem like something that sets you apart from others, or makes you special and different. There’s something exciting and briefly empowering about posting about it on social media, but I doubt that this empowerment and excitement lasts or extends into anything tangible in our lives.
Let’s Talk Day encourages us to talk about our struggles and destigmatize the issues surrounding mental health, but with social media being so present in our lives, only talking about these things over this medium may not help people in the ways we think it will.
There seems to be a larger societal phenomenon in our books, movies, T.V. shows, and social media reflecting an alarming trend of media glorifying mental illness. Take the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, based on Jay Asher’s novel Thirteen Reasons Why. In the book, Hannah kills herself by overdosing on pills (then leaves thirteen videotapes of the thirteen reasons why she chose to take her life, intended for those who were close to her). But on screen, Hannah takes her life by slitting her wrists with a razor borrowed from her parents’ shop. The scene is graphic and the writers justify in the behind-the-scenes documentary Beyond the Reasons that portraying her death this way was meant to dispel “romantic” outlooks of suicide.
Unfortunately, it seems that the television show may have done just the opposite. In the three months following the release of the series, 94 more people aged 10-19 committed suicide in the U.S. than experts expected.
13 Reasons Why made an attempt to talk about the hard truths of suicide, but instead of giving hope for people struggling, it was “irresponsible,” according to Katie Dhingra, senior lecturer in criminological psychology at Leeds Beckett University.
“[The show] gives the impression that Hannah is able to live on, after death, witnessing people’s reactions to her tapes, and achieves her desired outcome of teaching people a lesson. This fails to demonstrate the permanence of suicide,” Dhingra wrote in an article for ***The Conversation.
It seems that having conversations about mental health in films or on social media are not always beneficial. Conversations around mental illness may cause those who see them to be triggered, envious, or inspired to take their illness to a dangerous or harmful extreme.
One place where the glorification of mental illness is most clear is in the pro-ana (pro anorexia) community, which is active on social media and topic-related websites. Anorexia is classified as a mental disorder/illness, but in certain social media communities, it is viewed as positive and essential to members’ worth. Pro-ana websites state things like, “You aren’t attractive if you are not thin,” “Thou shall not eat without feeling guilty,” and “You can never be too thin.”
These ideas are used to convince people that they should embrace anorexia and seriously abuse their body rather than gain weight. There is plenty of pro-ana material posted on social media, all of it glorifying anorexia and promoting unhealthy behaviours. When one posts an idea in favour of disordered eating behaviours, others may follow because, more often than not, posts display thin bodies: something that many of us want. This can be especially harmful if someone struggling with recovery stumbles across one of these sites.
When we see polished posts about someone’s struggle with an eating disorder or depression or anxiety, we can find the prospect of making the same kind of post attractive because they are gaining recognition and encouragement that we naturally want. However, this praise and validation instantly glorifies that struggle and makes it look desirable.
In an article from the International Journal of Teaching and Education, Jinan Jennifer Jadayel, Rola Jadayel, and Karim Medlej present two case studies that explore youth (aged 15-22) experiences with the glorification of mental illness on social media.
Participants reported that they were very familiar with the phenomenon of glorified mental illness on social media. One participant said: “Depression was appealing to me. I exaggerated the thing on Tumblr, saved many pictures and started sketching depressing drawings. It took a few months before I sought help and got diagnosed and treated for depression.”
Some participants claimed that social media was portraying anxiety as a joke and a trend, and that having it was portrayed as cute or attractive.
One youth claimed that “social media is romanticizing depression; you stop seeing it as a mental illness but a way of life.”
Often, our only source of information about how others deal with mental illness is posts on social media, which aren’t necessarily portraying things accurately. If we want to know more about the struggles many people deal with, we need accurate sources and representations that are not just Netflix series and Instagram posts, especially if we have people that are close to us who are struggling. We need to have readily available sources of information about mental illness that are better than social media posts about influencers who struggle.
I think Bell has the right idea. It’s good to talk about struggles with mental illness, but we need to go further. We should be talking about our issues and struggles, but not on social media; instead, we should talk to those who are near and dear to us. When we post on social media, we get quick comments of encouragement, but that’s it. It’s just instant gratification. If we put all the effort we pour into social media — creating the right caption, getting a good angle, editing the photo properly — into seeking out actual care for ourselves, I think our perceptions of mental health would be a lot different.
If, instead of broadcasting our struggles, we actually went to therapy, or even joined an online chat group geared toward positive and helpful recovery from mental illness, the whole idea of glorified mental illness and the envy or trendiness that tags along with it might begin to disappear. We could have deeper relationships with our friends because we would be talking to them about the real things going on in our lives, rather than doing that through social media posts. We can still share about mental health online, but in a constructive way, so that people won’t turn to likes and comments for encouragement or attention, and instead go to those close to them to find ways to truly cope with mental illness.
Illustration: Renee Campbell
