How Hard It Really Is by J S Park

Author:J S Park [Park, J S]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780692910368
Publisher: TWE Media
Published: 2017-07-08T04:00:00+00:00

I'll Have What She's Having

Why would anyone even fake an illness as awful as depression?

I believe that a certain romanticism of mental illness has seeped its way into our global culture, from Hollywood to music to social media, portraying mental illness as quirky, desirable, and attractive. With a couple of flourishes, mental illness can be framed as a glamorous, triumphant battle, or a haunting, artistic foray into nihilistic pondering. But anyone suffering from such an illness will tell you: there's nothing desirable or attractive about dealing with a broken brain each day. And to capitalize on that is diminishing and insulting.

I say this with clenched teeth: My suffering and yours has often been minimized into a secondary, self-pitying prop for profit and attention. Our suffering has been assembly-lined for mass consumption. Like with any other market: everyone wants a piece.

Many of the surveys I conducted were bitter about the hijacking of depression as a marketable brand. One respondent wrote, "Some people think depression is black and white photos on your Instagram and staying home for the day." A respondent went as far as to say she was sick of the word stigma. She wrote, "I am tired of the talk about stigma—we get it by now. The word depression is being diluted, I think it's just become a saturated market honestly, which really discounts the intensity of my experience ... Depression and other mental illnesses [have become] a kind of 'fun label' for people to toss around and use as a defense for shady behavior."

Another respondent spoke at length about a subculture of fashionable death and depression, in which the self-labeled "depressive" would blast anyone who "didn't understand me," would compete over how much medication they were taking, or post pictures of self-harm as bragging rights. The respondent, regarding this "trend," says:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.