Depression is not cool

I have over a long period of time focused on social media and how the youth have used it over the years to communicate with one another. Over the years I have seen many teens use social media to make depression seem like a “nice and cool thing to have”. There has been an influx of teens using social media to share their self-diagnosis of depression. They are confusing depression or mental issues with shared human emotions such as sadness.

Depression, defined by Psychiatry.org is a mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest. Also called major depressive disorder or clinical depression, it affects how you feel, think and behave and can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems. Sadness, on the other hand, is defined as emotional pain. In simpler words, depression is extreme sadness. Depression is often said to be caused by chemical imbalance in the brain. Depression is a soul sucking, crippling condition that destroys people from the inside out.

Now, what I have seen is many young social media users jumping on the “depression bandwagon” to appear cool or to seek more attention and to get more people to feel sorry for them. I am in no way a doctor to tell who is depressed or who is not but, I can identify a social media attention seeker when I see one. Simple everyday tasks have been linked to depression by many people on social media, if they cannot find their favourite shirt they think they are depressed, if they fail a test they think they are depressed and sometimes even finishing their favourite chocolate to some can be depressing. You are not. You are disappointed, you are upset. You have been let down and maybe you annoyed and disappointed yourself. What you feel are natural human emotions, not depression. On one side we have people who actually have it. They are the people who stop smiling mid-afternoon for no reason, the people who have a harder and harder time getting out of bed, the people who nurture thoughts that friends and family dislike them. On the other side we have…I'm not sure what to call it, but let me describe it to you. These people brag about their mental illness. These people who fake their depression make it harder for others to come out and talk about their issues and make others really question the severity of their issues. Depression is not a cool thing. It is a mental illness. Breaking up with your boyfriend is not depression it is just you sad and disappointed that you are out of a relationship, but I have seen many youth diagnose themselves with depression on social media just because they broke up with someone. Depression is not a trend that you can use to garner attention for yourself on social media. It is a serious mental issue. There are those who are genuinely affected by it and who go through it on a daily basis and many of them have shared their experiences on social media. There are those who run to social media and used it as a way to call for help and to seek some kind of assistance with regard to their mental issue and those are the ones who deserve the attention and not those ones who simply do it because depression is a “trendy” thing. The use of imagery and quotes is one way I have seen many “want to be depressed” people seek attention. Those who seem to seek out and share imagery associated with torment, but are not clinically depressed and believe in their own pain, but they often blur the line between depression and commonplace negative emotions. This makes it difficult to tell who is really affected and what clinical depression really is. This online cultivation of beautiful sadness is easy to join and anyone can take a picture, turn it black and white, pair it with a quote about misunderstood turmoil, and automatically be gratified with compassion and pity and voila! You have an individual who really thinks they are depressed.

I think many of the attention seeking youth and those not affected by it glorify it because they want to be different. This sense of being different, of understanding the world for what it truly is, is the gratification these teenagers seek. If they are part of this community, they are part of something dark and beautiful, something misunderstood by the rest of their peers.



[email protected]