1 in every 5 Australians (about 4 million people) suffer from a mental illness. 4 million people with pain, stress, and discomfort every single day. Mental health is a very taboo topic in the media, but when it is discussed it’s portrayed in all the wrong ways. The most common mental illnesses a person experiences are depression and anxiety. The romanticisation of mental health isn’t and shouldn’t be acceptable like the way it’s treated in TV, the news, and social media. The media portrays mental health in all the wrong ways, it’s teaching teens the wrong ways to help someone with a mental illness, and it triggers those with a mental illness with the way it’s shown.
How media portrays mental health is just downright disgusting and the television series “13 Reasons Why” is a large advocate to the topic. In the show, 17 year old Hannah Baker suffers from depression, and after everything happens to her, she decides to commit suicide. She leaves 13 cassette tapes with the 13 reasons of why she killed herself behind and gets one boy to deliver them out and pass them along so everyone knows why Hannah Baker killed herself. If you have depression, it is a psychological disorder, not “you’re the reason I died”. 13 Reasons Why hasn’t properly displayed the symptoms of depression, let alone it connecting to suicide. This pain of not wanting to live is called clinical depression, and it isn’t caused by weakness but by a lack of “happy chemicals” in the brain, such as serotonin. A lack of serotonin production is a genetic factor that can be inherited and can vulneralise a person to being especially open to stress, such as the trauma of sexual assault that Hannah experienced. The TV show “13 Reasons Why” doesn’t address the topic of mental health in the way it should, by properly showing what pain and/or suffering they go through and not the blaming of others as to why they committed suicide.
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The confrontation of what really goes down in someone’s mind if they have a mental illness really needs to go down. Many people around you, the girl who sits two seats down from you in math class, the awkward baker you buy your fairy bread from, and even the business-savvy teacher that no one likes, they all could possibly suffer from a mental illness. Teenagers need to start learning how to care and how to help someone that has a mental illness. However, depression becomes exceedingly challenging when mainstream news outlets, which millions of people rely on for daily updates, remain largely silent on suicides and other topics related to depression. If you went to your TV, newspaper, or radio, there wouldn’t be any reports on suicides. 65,00 children (aged 10-14) die every year from suicide and maybe 2% of them would be reported about on the news. If hearing about Mental Health on the news more often, teenagers and adults would be more familiar with the mentions of depression and suicide.
The ways mental health is displayed on social media is stomach sickening. Most apps have been getting better at the ways mental health is shown, by blocking hashtags and covering disturbing images, but on an app called Tumblr this hasn’t taken action yet. Hashtags like #thinspo are floating around in the Tumblr app, and they are disturbing. Imagine a picture of a young girl, about the age of 13, of her in a flower crown prancing around the garden, tagged #thinspo. #thispo is a tag that includes images of girls who starve themselves, that have an eating disorder, yet chose to post pictures of themselves so others get “inspiration” and copy what they do. Someone that has an eating disorder requires medical attention, a doctor, not a creepy social media app where they can “show off” and “inspire” other girls so copy what they do. This is also very much triggering for those who are on the Tumblr app who suffer from an eating disorder, or those who used to. Possibly seeing the hashtag #thinspo could cause an anxiety attack or a breakdown, giving them flashbacks of what they used to be. Social media must stop the ways they communicate with mental health.
This is why we need to stop romanticization of mental health, the media portrays mental health in all the wrong ways by using television shows, it’s teaching teens the wrong ways to help someone with a mental illness and binding the topic in the news, and it triggers those with a mental illness with the way it’s shown on social media. We can change this. Report any tags seen on social media that could be triggering. Write articles about suicides and mental health. File complaints about TV shows that are wrecking and triggering us. You can contribute to the stopping of romanticizing mental health.
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