Is It Cool to Be Sad?

Are we romanticising mental health?

This might sound contrarian.

And most likely will kick the hornet’s nest, but like an inquisitive schoolboy I’m prepared for the sting.

In the malaise of wokeness I’ve come to wonder if mental-health has become trendy?

Now I’m no psychologist, but you only need to open your social platform of choice to notice it’s hashtag is being flippantly thrown around like a bong at a frat party.

While I agree mental health once was a taboo the destimatisation has inadvertently swung the pendulum the opposite way to romanticised infatuation.

I say this because I noticed the narrative shift when I used to work for a tech company that abundantly championed anything to do with mental health, mostly as part of their PR schtick.

In the hope of sounding like benevolent ambassadors of love and peace with rainbows shooting from their heart like some LSD hyped Care Bears episode — they were nothing more than another app driven by DAU’s and monetisation.

No matter how many kumbaya meetings of sharing and caring we had it was about as insincere as hangman’s handshake.

When companies, especially, social platforms say, “We care about your mental health” this sycophantic commentry is nothing more than a corporate facade. They capitalising on your sadness. A spade is a spade what they really want is for all of us to consume as much content as possible and stay on their app until our eyeballs bleed.

Seems counterintuitive to positive mental health.

But this isn’t about social platform’s demise on society.

It’s about a serious condition that’s become a trendy buzzword.

While I recognise the importance to normalise and destigmatise this subject, I question how flippantly the word is thrown around like a bong at a frat party.

It’s used to mean something, but now you only need to jump on the internet to see it’s littered with stories of people claiming to suffer from mental health, sometimes for the most asinine reasons.

The twitter account So Sad Today, is four thousand short of a million followers as I write this. The more I scroll down to read each tweet the more my day begins to manifest as the title suggests. I start to even question whether the tweets offer solice or melancholy. I soon discover the author’s written a book by the same name as well as another joyful read called, Superdoom.

What’s even more discouraging is according to Twitters trending hashtags, 250 tweets with the hashtag #mentalheath have appeared in the last hour.

That’s a lot of sadness.

It will be no surprise then if I told you that the demand for Self-help audiobooks grew by 20% in 2021

And as of today’s date the number one selling book on Amazon is, surprise suprise, a self-help book.

Nowadays it feels like anyone is self-help guru out to make a quick buck.

Reminds me of the ninetees when you could sue for just about anything, even a hot cup of coffee.

Because Lord knows coffee should have a heat warning.

And come to think of it so should a chilli!

Now admittedly social narrative has done two things. It’s brought mental health into spotlight which is good thing, but it’s also made it an easy scapegoat to hide behind.

I’ll give you two examples.

A few years ago a good friend of mine went to see a psychologist about the impact of negative feelings as a result of recently terminated relationship. Long story short, on the first consultation and thirty minutes in, he was diagnosed as clinically depressed and by the end of the session handed a prescription for antidepressants. Reading this sentence probably sounds standard, but my friend didn’t feel like drugs were the solution and so he questioned the diagnosis and took his concern to his local GP instead.

And in with one simple question asked it automatically pointed straight at the answer.

“How’s your diet?”

Turns out his ex girlfriend convinced him to give up meat.

This in turn affected his iron intake, which manifested in horrendously low mood swings.

Meat was the answer, not pills.

The second example is a popular narrative floating around where rather high statistics are broadly quoted in the public domain as a defence to why transgender kids are committing suicide due to emotional distress. Whether it’s a lack public toilet recognition or banning from playing girls sports the knee-jerk reaction of mental health generalisations is taking precedence over common sense.

To spare the vitriol I’m not aiming to be insensitive or transphobic in anway.

I’m merely pointing out the absurdity of untruths disguised as truths.

Or should I say inflated self-diagnosis for convenience sake.

I recently read an article on whether the high percentage of suicide attempts for trangender women is a plausible statistic.

Turns out, as the author suggests, “the sample used was one of convenience not a selected and randomized study with proper control groups”.

He uses a simple yet effective analogy, “If one were to sample a glass of water from the ocean and see that it contains no fish; then conclude that there are no fish anywhere in the ocean, we would all know that is false”.

The article goes on to use other facts to disprove this over-proportioned statistic essentially highlighting societies rush defence of misused information to justify mental health. Random statistics — which are nothing more than distorted convenience instead of quantifiable truth.

The sad truth (no pun intended) is that when life now throws us lemons instead of making lemonade we focus on our wounded mental health. Collective self-diagnosis has become the norm to the point where it’s blurred the line between what is authentic and what might be performance. It’s far from coincidental that the introduction of social media and the internet paralleled a spike in anxiety and depression amongst millennials and Gen Z’s. In fact it’s the highest it’s ever been compared to previous generations. Admittedly, some would argue the numbers have always been high we just never knew before. While perhaps true, I’d argue an inadvertent trivialisation of mental health equally has played a role.

Mental health isn’t some sort of club you join. It’s not like in Dead Poets Society where you sneak off into the night to a cave so you can retell some sad poetry and wallow in self-pity. Admittedly, through the decades gloom has been somewhat fashionable from Goths to Emo kids where identity is worn along with lipstick and dyed black hair. The difference is it’s more a statement than a self-diagnosis which eventually passes over time. What I’m stressing is different. In today’s climate more and more young people are actively seeking out other young people with mental health issues in some sort of tribal safety zone. It’s as if finding someone wearing the badge of mental health is proverbial antidote in itself. Sad people finding more sad people isn’t necessarily the answer. The fact that celebrities are now popping up all over the internet with their “coming out” moment only glamorises the subject even more.

While destigmatisation has been a good thing by forcing people to speak up, it’s also become some sort of a competitive activity amongst peers in the sad culture olympics. Without sounding like your grandad speaking, when I grew up if you were feeling down, you might not have openly talked to your peers about your feelings as much, but you sure learned to harness any negative thoughts into something positive, like sports or any extra-mural activity. There was no need to bucket my thoughts into a medical diagnosis because there was no reason to dwell on it. Instead I went out into the fresh air where skateboarding in my street after school was a way for me to put all my angst, insecurities and stresses of the world into landing an Ollie. And when I eventually did, I didn't care that no one was around to document it or that it wasn’t shared online for millions of strangers to like.