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Christopher Kantewa is an IT student at the Namibia University of Science and Technology

Depression, defined by the 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 disease that destroys people from the inside out.

Now what I have seen is many social media using youth jump on the “depression badwagon” 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 not but I can point out 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 are annoyed and disappointed in 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 without reason, the people who have a harder and harder time getting themselves out of bed, the people who have thoughts of friends and family disliking them. On another 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 being 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 have 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.