Payal Nagpal
The Tumblr blog entitled “Depression, Suicide, Anxiety and Self-Harm”, drowning-painfully.tumblr.com, is one of many Tumblr blogs that are part of a phenomenon popularised this decade – the romanticisation, aestheticization and eroticisation of mental illness. This blog features original posts like the following that aestheticization and beautifies suicidality, some of which have more than 4,000 notes (notes are “reblogs” and “likes”).
Tumblr is essentially a microblogging site where people create posts with text, pictures, GIFs or videos, which go on their blogs. Other users can “like” those posts and “reblog” to get it on their own blog. They are able to interact with each other in this way, and send direct messages. This creates a community, but it is often an unhealthy one where there is an unsupervised discourse about mental illness, especially suicide, self-harm and anorexia amongst a very impressionable demographic: according to Business Insider, 46% of users are between 16 and 25 years old (Smith, 2013). Although Tumblr administration put a policy into action where they would take down blogs promoting suicide, self-harm and anorexia, these blogs are still prevalent; and many like drowning-painfully, feature romanticisation of mental illness (HuffingtonPost, 2012).
drowning-painfully also reblogged the following image, an artistic and florally decorated noose, whose original poster is untraceable. It has been reblogged and liked over 600,000 times on Tumblr, proving just how rampant this phenomenon is.
Tumblr features a narrative where mental illness seem desirable or symptomatic of a particular type of personality: perceptive, emotional, deep and creative. However, this is not entirely recent. The idea of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl has been around since the 1960s, even though it was only termed as such by a film critic in 2005. The (rather sexist) trope features attractive, flaky, giggly girls who harbour dark secrets and are actually full of deep melancholy (Schwyzer, 2013). And this “darker side” makes them mysterious and deep, and therefore more attractive – the Maria in The Sound of Music and Catherine in Jules and Jim are prime examples. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was written in the ‘20s – it did not embody the MPDG, but it is one of the first books that strengthened the link between melanchony and poignancy. Pretty girls were more sensual because they were sad. In that era, the tragic beauty moved from being a phenomenon that was observed in nature – both in the physical and metaphysical sense (something Shakespeare and many romantic poets wrote about), to actually having a physical embodiment, usually a woman. The history of the eroticisation of misery is long and complex. However, the explicit romanticization of illness, and not just an eroticization of sadness, is a phenomenon that has become increasingly popular in this decade, on the internet – specifically on Tumblr, and sometimes on Instagram and Facebook.
The image above featured on drowning-painfully, but has since been removed by Tumblr. It shows flowers growing out of self-harming cuts on someone’s arm, making the idea of self-harm beautiful and desirable. It undermines the reality of depression – which is not; therefore it could leave people who do suffer from it feeling more isolated because they don’t fit in to the idea of how depression “should be” – this could actually worsen their mental health. Further, this kind of aestheticization of mental illness can further the stigma surrounding it. It falls into the (untrue) narrative that people who have mental illness are just attention seeking and feign symptoms in an effort to be “cool.” Images like these could actually provide positive reinforcement for people who self-harm, dissuading them from getting help. It could also encourage suicidality: posts that romanticise suicide could push people with suicidal tendencies to taking action by reinforcing the idea that it is a viable, convenient and even noble “way out” of depression. Similarly, large groups of people with mental illness who interact unsupervised could end up triggering each other and worsening symptoms.
Mariam Ali Al-Mazrouie, the founder of the Global Humanitarian Aid Foundation, conducted a survey in 2014 to examine the attitudes towards the portrayal of mental illness in the media. This substantiates the idea that people think depression might be a “trend” because of how mental illness is being portrayed, increasing the stigma instead of reducing it. More than 266 respondents answered 13 questions about the portrayal of mental illness online. One question asked participants to respond to the quote “stressed, depressed but well dressed” and 173 sad they felt that they could relate to it. 170 respondents also thought that a suicide note in the form of a poem was “beautiful” (Al-Mazrouie, 2015).
This sort of representation of mental illness has reduced the idea of being mentally ill to an aesthetic or trope. The “Tumblr Sad Girl” is a phrase many millenials throw around when referring to a specific “type of girl” – usually with a set of “alternative” interests and an introverted disposition. drowning-peacefully shared the following quote: “I like people with depth, I like people with emotion, I like people with a strong mind, an interesting mind, a twisted mind, and also someone that can make me smile.” This graphic below was also shared. Combined, it sends the message that good art comes as a result of depression and other mental illness, making it desirable or even essential to create media.
While art about suicidality and self-harm like mentioned before could be a form of self-expression, or even spread awareness and destigmatize mental illness, they may have the opposite effect. It brings in the idea of appropriation and ownership. If people with mental illness create art about their experiences, it is less likely to be romanticised because they understand and deal with the dark realities of it. However, artists appropriating mental illness blindly trivialises the issue and takes away from the real struggle of people suffering from mental illness. Dr. Devapriya Roy, a professor of Creative Writing and bestselling author put it this way:
“I try to get my students to write about things that they experience. Because when they talk about a character – especially one with mental illness – that they don’t totally understand, they have a tendency to aestheticise. A student without depression, as far as I know, wrote about a depressed character, a frail girl who cried silent tears and wrote poetry – it was presented as something desirable, the attractive Pixie Dream Girl everybody wants to be. Another student who I know has depression, wrote about a boy who hadn’t showered for days and would sob so violently and loudly and would bite his hands out of frustration. As someone who creates media, I think one of the most important things to do is make sure I give tragedy and ugly things their due weight, and not make it seem romantic or desirable.”
When mental illness is not given its due weight and is made to seem desirable, it feeds into the (untrue) narrative that people with mental illness are feigning symptoms for attention. Blogs like drowning-painfully could dissuade people who need help from seeking it, and it creates an extremely unhealthy, damaging culture online that could have tragic real-world consequences.
Sources
drowning-painfully.tumblr.com
Smith, C. (2013, December 12). Tumblr Offers Advertisers A Major Advantage: Young Users, Who Spend Tons Of Time On The Site. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.in/Tumblr-Offers-Advertisers-A-Major-Advantage-Young-Users-Who-Spend-Tons-Of-Time-On-The-Site/articleshow/27250102.cms
(2012, February 24). Tumblr Revises Policy On Self-Harm Content, Bans 'Hunger Blogs'. Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/23/tumblr-issues-statement-r_n_1296857.html
Schwyzer, H. (2013, July 09). The Real-World Consequences of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Cliché. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/07/the-real-world-consequences-of-the-manic-pixie-dream-girl-clich-233/277645/
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