February Digital Magazine

THE MEDIA NORMALIZING
BAD MENTAL HEALTH
26
holland cogan | staff writer
Find out how social media can cantribute or cause issues with mental health
Whether it’s a meme page on
instagram, for you page on Tik
tok, or the release of the next
new ‘relatable” song it seems the media
is becoming increasingly more comfortable
showing and releasing content that
normalizes bad mental health. People
think that raising awareness through the
media is helpful, but can songs discussing
suicide and images depicting teenage
depression have a negative affect?
Meme pages on instagram have always
been a fun way to poke at real life situations,
but lately self deprecating humor is
flooding the internet. Pictures with captions
that make self medicating and disorders
humorous is not so funny when children
come across them and think it’s ok to
think that way. The media is also promoting
clothing with anxiety and depression
definitions on them. A popular media star
Corinna Kopfs released merchandise with
the word Anxiety in bold letters with the
definition below it. This caused a huge debacle
on social media because people said
that anxiety wasn’t something to glamorize
and use for marketing purposes to
make a profit. The line of what is helping
or harming people seems to be fading on
media platforms as people become more
comfortable posting without repercussions.
The for you page on tik tok is also
filled with trends that compare body types
against each other, check the level of insecurities
on a hand, and have sad point of
views where the subjects deal with assault
and death. Tik tok is an app that has a very
young audience with 41% of tik tok users
aged between 16 and 24. It is very easy to
spend hours on it with the average time
spent on the app being 52 minutes. That
gives a lot of time to view 15 second videos.
Another example is Billie Eilish’s song Everything
I Wanted. The song touches on
suicide and someone who “stepped off of
the golden” (the Golden Gate Bridge.)The
song shares details of how nobody cried
or noticed when the person died. Many
Billie Eilish fans are young adults and
this song has the potential to be taken the
wrong way. Matthew Foltz (10) Says that,
“social media is amazing as it grants us
access to lightning fast way of communicating.
Though it creates the consequence
of expected response, creating a feeling of
anxiety and uncertainty amongst other
unintended emotions.” He at times feels
that feelings of anxiety stir up, and unexpected
emotions hit him sometimes after
listening to music or viewing images. This
is certainly how many people feel, and because
children are more impressionable
and their emotional processing is still de-
“Social media is a powerful tool and a great way to connect with
others, but you have to use it wisely and you have to learn to not
let it effect you.” Amanda Jacobson(10)
“I don’t have social media because
I don’t want to be depressed.” Isaac
Swanson(10)
Photo courtesy of Unsplash.com