The Aestheticization Of Mental Illness Online - An Essay

Mental illness is a difficult topic to bring up; speaking on your experiences with mental illness can be shameful, awkward and downright embarrassing. This is why it’s both interesting and alarming to me to see this new-age uprising of mental illness. On the surface, it looks like there is an increased dialogue surrounding mental illness, which is true and a very valuable conversation for us to be having, but when you scratch deeper there’s a lot more harm that’s being done. The revolution of mental health advocacy has a lot of issues within it that seem to be contributing to the stigma of mental disorders more than it is reducing it through using mental disorders as an aesthetic choice which silences those who don’t actually enjoy living with mental illness.

Buzzwords

A lot of mental illness specific terminology have become buzzwords, appropriating disorder-specific symptoms and watering down the meaning of them. One example of this is dissociation. Dissociation is a phenomenon that occurs under stress, leading to feelings of being detached and unreal and even memory loss. People have began using this word as a way to describe zoning out or daydreaming as a way to be ‘relatable’ and have ‘trauma points’. For people who experience dissociation, it can be very frightening and those with chronic depersonalisation and derealisation (often abbreviated to DPDR), depression can be common and even suicide attempts. 

Another term that has become a buzzword is mania. Mania is one of two defining symptoms of Bipolar Disorder, the other being depression. Mania and hypomania are specific to Bipolar Disorder - they are not present in any disorders other than schizoaffective mood disorders, dementia and sometimes due to physical or neurological disease, such as thyroid issues, Parkinson’s or tumours. Mania presents itself with a mix of insomnia, energy, goal-oriented activity, impulsivity, flight of speech/ideas and psychosis, to name a few. Hypomania is a version of mania that causes less impairment, whereas mania leads to significant impairment or hospitalisation. Hypomania with psychosis is mania by definition. 

A lot of individuals (namely on Tik Tok) with Borderline Personality Disorder have been appropriating this term, since BPD symptoms can often pair themselves to create a hypomanic-like presentation though the two things are distinct. Mania does not always have a trigger, but BPD symptoms always do since the disorder mainly manifests itself in interpersonal relationships. BPD symptoms that look similar are impulsivity, mood lability, transient stress-related psychosis and unstable interpersonal relationships. During a flare-up of BPD symptoms, these can look like hypomania or mania but they are not mania, because BPD does not come with mania. Mania can be a stand-alone diagnosis and this is important to note, however some BPD individuals diagnosed with a manic episode feel that this proves that BPD comes with mania, but the two are separate diagnoses. Consequently, mania has been watered down to mean “impulsivity,” “high energy” and “excitability.” It also goes hand-in-hand with the aestheticization of the term ‘god complex’ - which in actuality refers to delusions of grandeur present in mania, psychotic disorders and some personality disorders. Of course, this has been replaced to mean ‘burst of confidence’. If you want to know what a god complex really looks like, go look at Kanye West being cringey during his manic episodes (he has Bipolar Disorder).

Not so aesthetic now, huh?

If only it worked like this. I wish it worked like this.

I made a Tik Tok on this matter specifically, and was met with so much criticism I ended up in hospital for an overdose because I felt so overwhelmed and hated for voicing my opinion. I said that it was harming those with Bipolar Disorder who feel their symptoms are being watered down, and though some with Bipolar Disorder disagreed and said that it was okay for those with BPD to appropriate this term since it describes their experiences (and it is okay to have a different opinion), the majority agreed and said they feel their experiences are being stolen from them and turned into a quirky relatable episode rather than them being downright dangerous. Even people without BPD are using this term, since it is now a catch-all for moments you did something without thinking and it had whoopsy consequences, rather than a symptom specific to those with mood disorders or neurodegenerative diseases. So people with these disorders are left without clinical terminology to appropriately describe their experiences, so that people without these disorders have a synonym for a word that would appropriately describe it just fine. It is really hurtful to see people quirkifying manic episodes when the truth is these episodes are filled with shame, regret, devastating consequences, embarrassment and self-loathing.

 Some would actually call this... happy.

Another reason people got so upset about this Tik Tok is because I said it watered down Bipolar experiences, which somehow translated to “people with Bipolar Disorder have it worse than those with BPD.” Many people were suggesting BPD manic episodes are just as bad as Bipolar manic episodes. I don't doubt these episodes suck, but this kind of mentality leads to shit like this.

Which implicitly suggests that BPD is ‘special’ Bipolar, maybe even ‘worse’ Bipolar. Yeah, that doesn’t at all affect the Bipolar community.

This is what happens. The truth is that when we over-use these terms and create an alternate definition for them, we are mocking those who wish to speak out about their struggles with it. We are telling them their story does not matter and won’t be taken seriously. It’s a more covert way of telling people “everyone is a little OCD”, because everyone experiences these things. They are turned into something relatable that makes you look a little edgier and more interesting - all at the expense of those who suffer with these ailments. Since BPD is in the limelight right now, and Bipolar Disorder is not, the consequences are that the voices of those with BPD are amplified until the voices of those with bipolar disorder are muted. We should all have a space in the conversation, and with the word mania being used as a buzzword the voices of those with Bipolar Disorder go unheard. As well as those who experience dissociation, those who have been gaslighted, those with Narcissistic or Antisocial Personality Disorder and the list goes on. These are not colloquial terms; they are clinical terminology, not diagnoses to throw around or words to throw into a story to dramatise it.

Fakeclaiming Is Evil

Fakeclaiming is a term that refers to calling out those who you believe are faking their disorders. This phenomenon is denounced for the harm it causes. It can send those with disorders into a spiral, it can be triggering, and some other reasons that aren’t quite clear to me. The issue is that by denouncing fakeclaiming, we are denying the existence of illness fakers. It’s a touchy subject to address, since no one wants to believe others are faking their mental illness - who would do that? But the truth is, mental illness has been trending since it has come into the spotlight. In the mid-late 2000s, among scene kid culture, it was common to claim to ‘hear voices’ to add to the dark and scary aesthetic scene kids were trying to cater to. Scene kid and emo kid culture were born out of not fitting in and being different, and they are very closely tied in with depression. As someone who was on the internet frequently during the height of this, I remember seeing lots of ‘edgy’ pictures saying “the voices are telling me to kill you”, etcetera - all very stigmatising, while simultaneously glorifying psychotic disorders. 

So if it was so trendy back then, why is it hard to believe it’s trendy today? While there is much more awareness around mental illness today due to the increased dialogue around it, there are also certain disorders that have, despite being nasty to live with, become desirable - and these are the ones normally in the limelight. At the moment, these are Borderline Personality Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder, usually surrounding alt and LGBT kids. In 2013 it was anxiety and depression, surrounding grunge and pastel goth aesthetics. In the late 2000s it was psychotic symptoms, surrounding scemo kid culture. It seems with each alternative culture of the time, there are certain illnesses that seem to spike which does not statistically make sense. If DID is only present in around 1% of the population and symptoms generally get worse around adulthood, how can 10% of the alt kids, mostly teenagers, have DID?

Sadly, it is likely another form of roleplay, as roleplay has become a ‘cringe’ interest so people would rather fake a disorder receiving much intrigue and attention than create OCs. A lot of individuals ‘kin’ fictional characters, meaning they share a connection with a character enough that they feel like part of their identity. Those who fake DID are often fictive-heavy, likely for this reason as they wish to ‘roleplay’ as their favourite character and claim them as part of their identity.

Another reason is people like the idea of having ‘friends in their head’ since unfortunately this has been the main focus of the discussion around DID. The reality is dissociative amnesia, flashbacks, dissociation, a lack of identity, comorbid mental health problems and significant impairment in all walks of life. This disorders stems from severe child abuse, often sexual and physical in nature, and the glorification of this disorder is so harmful to survivors of severe childhood abuse. While trauma is subjective, it is undeniable that being sexually abused routinely is more damaging to the psyche than being called abusive names.

The idea that people want certain mental disorders is not far-fetched. It sometimes comes from a place of innocent curiosity that ends up causing harm in the process.

As a teenager, emotions are also heightened due to the havoc your hormonal changes wreak on your mind. This can lead to experiencing voices, or being easily traumatised, or having no sense of identity, or feeling like a different person every day, or a need to reinvent yourself constantly. Unstable interpersonal relationships are a hallmark of both adolescence and BPD. This has resulted in many teenagers mistaking the emotional stress placed onto them by the mixture of hormones and pre-existing mental illness for something different. I won’t patronise by saying teenagers can’t have it that hard; as someone whose adolescence was the worst years of my life, I would be doing myself an injustice and going against my values of listening to what young people have to say about their mental health. But what I do want to convey here is that a particularly turbulent adolescence can look like BPD, which explains why so many teenagers relate to BPD. However, BPD is not diagnosed in adolescence except in extreme cases - which not even my hyper-sensitive, destructive and emotionally dysregulated 17 year old self fit into the criteria of. The same goes for DID - you lack a fully formed personality at the age of 15, and it feels like there’s so many different versions of yourself. The heightened stress of adolescence makes hearing voices an incredibly common phenomenon, from my experience working with young people. It makes sense how these symptoms can be mistaken for something much rarer, so there is the idea that they are not intentionally faking these disorders but rather confusing their experiences.

Finally, Tik Tok (and social media in general) rewards being ‘special’ or interesting. The algorithm very much endorses this behaviour, with relatable Tik Toks about suffering with mental illness being everywhere on the for you page of somebody who consumes this content (that was what my FYP looked like). The result of this is a community being built around a ‘who has it worse’ competitive mind-set. And that’s what hurting teenagers want the most: community. A lot of people in alternative subcultures, especially teenagers, struggle with mental health issues, and if their issues aren’t severe enough they feel like they don’t ‘fit in’ enough, leading to a high value being placed on how much trauma an individual has gone through, and what labels they have to prove it. And for an adolescent who can’t even fit into a weird kid subculture, sometimes you have to do what you have to do in order to feel a sense of belonging, something that is so important to those who lack a formed sense of identity and purpose because of their age. There is even a movement of individuals sharing their trauma stories on Tik Tok into a quick and quirky 15 second video over the top of a trending song - and the views on these guys skyrocket!

There seems to be an equal ratio of those with depression and anxiety to those with BPD and DID. Depression and anxiety are very common, but BPD is estimated to affect 1.4 - 5% of the population, whereas DID is around 0.01 - 1% of the population, adding up to a maximum total of 6% of the population on average. In comparison, around 15% of the population has suffered with depression. Furthermore, an estimated 2.8% of the population suffer with Bipolar Disorder, and Schizophrenia is barely 1%. These statistics showcase the over-representation of BPD and DID on social media, specifically Tik Tok, evident by the seemingly equal ratio of depression sufferers to BPD and anxiety sufferers, as well as the inequal ratio of DID sufferers to Bipolar and Schizophrenia sufferers collectively.

Sure, Jan.

If this feels like I am being too harsh, allow me to enlighten you on the epidemic of endogenic systems. An endogenic system is a word for a self-described system (multiple aka sufferer of DID) without origins of trauma. Now, DID is inherently a trauma-based disorder caused by a child experiencing so much abuse that their brain cannot cope, thus fragmenting to preserve its livelihood. The fragments create alters, short for alternate states of consciousness, each often (but not always) having its own role. The consequence of having different states of consciousness is an amnesia barrier preventing you from accessing the memories held by other alters. So how can you have DID without trauma, you may ask? Well the answer is pretty simple. You can’t. You cannot be born with DID. You can be born with a high disposition to dissociation and a low stress tolerance, but you aren’t born with abuse and you aren’t born with a disorganised attachment to caregivers.

And yet, endogenic systems are a thing! There is clearly a very big audience of people who want to have a trauma disorder and consequently fake it, yet we act holier than thou for not voicing any suspicions of individuals faking this disorder.

You stupid traumagenics are so privileged for getting horrifically abused as children and ending up as real systems! WE'RE the oppressed ones here!

You're just angry you were abused & developed a trauma-based disorder while I am special and got this trauma disorder for free <3

One of the things that differentiate trendy Tik Tok systems from… well, normal systems, is the over-the-top switching on camera and cuteifying of their alters. Their alters often have a perfectly developed aesthetic and a fully developed personality. Alters don’t tend to develop fleshed out personalities until adulthood. In your early to mid teens, your brain is not developed enough to be able to heal from multiplicity, yet their system communication is often off-the-charts (systems with top notch communication usually have gone through years of therapy to get to that point). They are able to switch on command, with overly dramatic switches. DID is a covert disorder developed during severe abuse - it is built with hiding in mind. Those with DID usually do not even notice symptoms until they are much older, hiding it even from themselves. So it does not make sense to think all these young people have this disorder. In fact, switches are often so covert you cannot even notice them unless you know the person really well, and generally only happen under high stress when switching is necessary.

Can we not keep our daydreams to ourselves now or...?

I have met two people diagnosed with DID. I have never, ever seen/noticed them switch, and they honestly didn’t seem to know all that much about it, not even what it meant. One of them told me most of their trauma during a period of high stress when they were triggered, and it was difficult to hear about. They were hysterical, they had hurt their self and yet when they came back and calmed down it was like nothing had happened. They told me about their alters, and they weren’t quirky with their own traits, there was just a more mature version of them, and a different gender version of them. That was all there was to it. Nothing about them was noticeably different to me. And that is not to say that is the only way to have DID - I wouldn’t know! But it is to say that the Tik Tok representation of DID is glorified and over-aestheticized and treated like it is just having friends in your head, when the reality of it is nothing of the sort.

Contagious Illness & Self-Diagnosis

When you begin to consume content regularly, it stays on your mind more often. This can change your thought patterns to work around the content you have been looking at. For example, it’s pretty simple to explain that consuming pro-ana content can encourage you to develop disordered eating patterns. That is what happened to me when I was 12 years old, and I found myself stumbling upon pro-ana and pro-mia tips, leading to a dark place for my confused self trying to find some control in the world and be pretty. Luckily, I was able to get myself out of that place even though disordered eating stayed behind and occasionally comes back to play with my mind. It stopped when I ceased browsing at the content in my free time as it became less of an obsession and more of a wandering thought.

Confirmation bias is a well documented phenomenon. When you begin to look for signs of an illness, they start to appear. In fact, it is so common amongst medical students that there is an entire syndrome named after the phenomenon called Medical Student’s Disease. Of course, when you are looking at relatable Tik Toks you find yourself worrying - do I have OCD? Do I have BPD? Am I autistic? Maybe so, but that is a question for a doctor, and the truth is you probably don’t have every diagnosis in the DSM-5. 

The issue that arises when you combine confirmation bias and the warped thought patterns that occur by over-consuming content is that you experience contagious mental illness. Mental disorders are not contagious by any means, but when you spend so much time looking at other people’s mental illness related content you can’t help but start to think that way too and develop those behaviours.

For example, I have had trauma in my past - a decent amount of it. However, I’m quite resilient and for the most part don’t find myself affected by it. I hardly think about it. This can be really invalidating when I start to feel down about it, because if I was really affected by my trauma I would be traumatised. And sometimes because of this, I try to intentionally trigger myself into being affected by my trauma. I consume content non-stop, I talk about the trauma, I listen to music I associate with the trauma, I psychoanalyse myself and it becomes a hugely detrimental obsession to the point I give myself breakdowns. And yet, when these phases pass, I forget about my trauma again. I stop feeling so lonely and damaged.

I am not saying that you need to just stop thinking about your trauma and get over it. I am explaining the two examples of this pattern I have experienced where over-consumption of relevant content has skewed my perception on reality and changed my thought patterns and behaviours. So this is a really dangerous problem that is sweeping social media right now.

On Tik Tok, there is a culture of over-pathologisation; normal behaviours are turned into a sign of mental illness. Jumping at loud noises is a trauma response, here are 12 signs your parents were narcissists, if you’re happy you’re ‘manic’, put a finger down and you might have x illness. And what is most problematic is they are often phrased so vaguely that everyone is on a continuum of these things - from procrastination to excessive planning, or being less emotional to being more sensitive.

It is only when these things are truly detrimental to you that they are a sign of something bigger. When mental illness is being constantly shoved in our face, we can’t help but internalise these things. Because one of my longest standing interests is mental illness, when I enter an obsessive period of fixating on it I find myself constantly preoccupied with analysing myself, turning everything into proof of my illness and connecting all my behaviours. I’ll say it: my psychiatric report accuses me of over-analysing things. Ouch.

Combined with the current trend of denouncing psychiatry, this has led to a spike in self-diagnosis and label-shopping because you must know what is wrong with you or you are an outlier. I appreciate the discussion around psychiatry - the truth is it has a lot of issues, has roots in racism, still has a problem with sexism and stigmatising personality disorders, and has barriers to accessibility especially in the US. But what we should not be doing is going so far as to say we know better than professionals.

Listen - psychiatrists are trained to detect your internal biases and often take months of building a rapport before being able to make a diagnosis. Sometimes they are wrong and misdiagnose even with their 15 years of experience and years of training, so why would we know better with a month’s research into the DSM-5? However, researching your potential mental health issues can be an important step towards getting a diagnosis so you can address it with a mental health professional who can either explain why it’s unlikely or you can explore it in more depth. Teenagers often have their mental health problems brushed off - I know I did. But what we are seeing is labels being put on some strange pedestal in a competition of “look how bad I have it.”

Ultimately, this issue does lie within label-shopping. Tik tok’s audience is majorly teens who are just trying to find a fixed identity, and in an increasingly consumerist culture that dictates you aestheticize your life, there is an increased pressure in knowing exactly what you are and where you fit - something that wreaks havoc on adolescents and encourages them to self-diagnose.

~For The Aesthetic~

It’s been established that for a whole variety of reasons, mental illness is a trend right now, mainly due to label-shopping. This has resulted in sensationalising and even fetishizing illnesses. The narratives about the sociopathic serial killer always sell. And for some reason, there are people claiming girls with BPD give the best head because they really want to choke, and that psychopaths are the best in bed.

This has resulted in the aestheticizing of mental illness. It is not only a trendy label that gives you internet clout, but also an aesthetic. In today’s consumerist culture, every aspect of your identity becomes a commodity to romanticize your life, and mental illness is no different. Traumacore is a common aesthetic that those with traumatic pasts have curated. It features childlike imagery on top of eerie but nostalgic backdrops with morbid repetitive text over the top, often posing existentialist questions. There is also yanderecore, a feminine aesthetic that uses lots of pink, manga and anime screencaps, threatening and possessive text, a theme of obsessive love and violent imagery such as blood and weapons. Thus we have the creation of the aesthetic of mental illness.

Popular media has also had an issue with glorifying mental illness and making it into something glamorous. Euphoria, with its beautiful colours, glittery makeup and breathtaking cinematography has unwittingly helped contribute to this - though at the same time fighting to portray the raw realities of mental illness with the gruelling scene of Rue in the midst of a dark Bipolar depression, so unmotivated she cannot even bring herself to go to the toilet resulting in a kidney infection. But can you see this and not think “I want to live in that world - it’s so beautiful”?

Why can't I cry glitter?

I’ve heard many people say they want to live in Euphoria, often trying to mimic the makeup style and fashion sense. I myself have partied with friends and during the gritty day after with the emptiness inside of us and the smudged eye makeup, we have told each other we could “totally be in Euphoria,” or we are “definitely Skins characters.” Though I cannot fault anyone for this as part of the appeal of these TV shows is the aesthetic choices made, is it really a surprise we have turned mental illnesses into a visual art?

Lana Del Rey has had a steady history of glamourising mental health problems, toxic love and addiction. Artsy lyrics saying “everything is fine, but I wish I was dead,” pasted over a beautiful woman with her perfectly done hair and flawless makeup, meanwhile having a reputation for being a sugar baby with a taste for cocaine, can’t help but misconstrue the reality of illness.

These images back in 2014 would get hundreds of thousands of reblogs to pastel grunge tumblrs and posted to many aesthetic instagram pages. Would these really get the same audience if it were a picture of a 30 year old former veteran with unbrushed teeth, greasy skin, red puffy eyes and the same pyjamas he had been wearing for the past 3 weeks? If it was an image of an abused 12 year old girl with awkward braces and a classic pre-teen dress sense being told off in the middle of her maths class for being unable to concentrate? It really is a question of how it is being conveyed rather than the subject matter - it is important to keep in mind your impressionable young audience and how they will take it, rather than how it is intended to be taken such as in the case of 13 Reasons Why. Intended as a show about suicide awareness, the adolescent audience have turned it into a series of black and white gifs with their romanticised quotes about how dreary depression is on top of a mysterious image of a beautiful girl, Hannah Baker.

There are also some fashion trends at the moment that stem from mental illness aesthetics - such as Tik Tok alt kids. They have their white bunny hats, their face is often mysteriously covered up with dark makeup and a mask, they sport their demonia boots and wear striped thigh highs with leg warmers or gloves and oversized hoodies.

Another example of this is menhera fashion - which is actually a very positive J-fashion movement centred around starting the discussion around mental health in Japan, mental illness being very stigmatised. It creates a necessary discomfort, and tells people the raw realities of suffering from illness. But at the same time, it contributes to these issues of making mental illness into a commodity - often associated with pastel guro art littered with pills, bandages, and other medical equipment. 

There is an important distinction to make between creating vent art out of your mental illness to liberate yourself, share your story and create a community with others - versus outright creating an aesthetic out of it. The former is perfectly okay and should always be encouraged; you should embrace what makes you different and be proud of yourself for surviving your struggles, always. But the latter constrains your mind into believing that the mental disorder you struggle with should be a part of your identity to the extent you should centre your life and aesthetic choices around it. And when you live that way, how can you ever want to recover? It tells you that treating your mental illness will take away your identity and you won’t know who you are beyond your illness. The fact this is increasingly normal today is an alarming sign of how our society is progressing and a sign we need to make a change.

Conclusion

I want the conversation to continue but these things need to be addressed so we don’t cause more harm. Mental illness is not a fashion statement, and it is not something to be used to make you more interesting. It is gruelling, difficult, impossible to live with even. When we turn an illness into a trend we silence the ones who are against these things being trendy who genuinely want their stories shared, and we also silence the voices of those not in the spotlight - those without ‘trendy’ disorders. I am wholeheartedly against censorship and believe in posting whatever you want but it truly does not hurt to have a little bit of awareness. When pro-ana communities share tips with each other on how to better restrict or purge, or when you see pinterest boards titled ~cute but psycho~ with meticulously curated aesthetics of a sensationalised version of mental illness, or when you see people overusing terminology until the meaning of the term has been completely colloquialised leaving people without language to describe their experiences adequately, this is a sign that the discussion is going completely wrong, and mental illness has been normalised instead of destigmatised. We do not need to normalise mental illness. When we normalise mental illness, we tell people that treatment is unnecessary, and it is a normal part of life that can’t be helped, and that without it you will not have a community. When we make mental illness the norm, we frame people’s identity around the label they have and place them on a pedestal for going through more suffering than the rest of us. All this does is create more stigma. Let's rethink the direction we're heading, and stop placing value on a label - let's place value on the story.