Has the pandemic encouraged us to open up about mental health on social media?
TW: mention of mental health and suicide
Take a look back over your social media feeds from 2020. Did you flippantly write a tweet about the overwhelming sense of anxiety and doom plaguing your every waking moment? Did you retweet a meme that perfectly captured your level of mental suffering? Did you take solace in the fact that, actually, it seemed that other people were having a hard time with this whole global pandemic thing too?
For so long, we have been told to be careful what we post on social media and obviously, for the most part, this is a pretty good thing to consider. But at what point does this sentiment prevent us from being our most authentic selves?
2020 seemed to be the year that a majority of people began candidly talking about mental health on main. People were bypassing their ‘finstas’ and ‘alt’ accounts to get real on their primary social media pages. Certainly within the circles I concern myself with on the internet (freelancers, writers, creatives, millennials and gen Z-ers), I noticed a steady increase in tweets about how people were just dealing with...everything. A few spoke about the immense effort of simply getting out of bed in the morning or how they no longer found joy in the things that comforted them in ‘normal’ times. But in addition to that, I saw people discuss the complicated and messy lows of mental health. The stuff that is, sadly, a little more taboo.
I began to see people candidly open up about self-checking into crisis centres, their experiences with getting diagnosed and talking to psychiatrists, even outwardly talking about the experience of suicidal thoughts. Aside from anxiety and depression, people were talking about the lesser-discussed aspects of mental health, like OCD and ASD. Moreover, these were people with significant, professional followings and blue check marks. I found indescribable comfort in this; it told me that it was OK to be struggling and even to recognise parts of my own mental health that I hadn’t considered (or had dismissed) before. The sense of solidarity and ‘normalness’ softened the anger I felt at myself for not being able to cope, as I thought everyone else was doing.
I’ve always approached social media as grounds to express myself online, whether that's personally (as in running a Tumblr dedicated to One Direction in the early 2010s) or professionally (using Twitter and Instagram to network and share projects and achievements). At the end of the day, those career and academic highs, fixations on certain boy bands or films, and even confessions of depressive episodes all make up who I am and wouldn’t it be disingenuous to cut out parts of it?
In a year of barely holding it together, I personally have taken so much solace in my peers simply talking about how they’re feeling. Yes, social media can be used to construct an idealised sense of self, but it can also be used to construct a real and refreshingly human sense of self too, something that became vital in 2020. It was important to realise that I could, in fact, be professional and career-driven but also mentally ill at the same time. And that it was completely fine and actually quite common. Who knew?!
Of course, the destigmatisation of mental health issues comes with negative side effects. The memeification of mental illness is a tricky landscape, for instance; on one hand it is a culture of togetherness and people often use humour to deal with trauma (liking a meme about suicide is often far easier than an actual cry for help). However, when does reliability turn into 1. exploitation of something for likes on social media and 2. desensitising the issue at hand?
There’s certainly a long road ahead for discussions about mental health, especially the messier stuff, particularly as it’s so easy to traverse into the realm of triggering with these open discussions. But what I experienced on social media in 2020 felt like baby steps into better, more honest territory.
