The Other Conversation About Mental Illness Nobody Wants to Have

As much as I love that we're finally having a much needed talk about mental illness, there is a highly disturbing undercurrent that I've been seeing all through the current rhetoric. In particular, around purported "support" communities on sites like Tumblr. Yeah, I know, I heard the collective groan, too. But while it's easy to dismiss Tumblr as the indie coffeeshop of the internet at which disaffected millenial hipsters gather, it's important to remember that it's a really big indie coffeeshop with 550 million users (almost 380 million of which are millenials, and this is going back to 2015). Thus, it's a significant influence, however dumb it may be.

And this disturbing undercurrent I've noticed is that a lot of the rhetoric around Tumblr appears to be pro-illness, and very much anti-recovery/management.

What I mean by this is that anytime a user brings up information or advice on how to get back to living, invariably somebody will barge in calling it "neurotypical bullshit" and not-so-subtlely implying that if you can function, you're not really ill. And that commentary will get shared and reblogged far more widely than the original advice.

As someone with diagnosed major depression and on medication for it, I can't even begin to tell you how fucking dangerous this is. And it's the conversation everyone seems to want to shut down.

Because from what I can gather, these Tumblr types are treating being mentally ill the same as they treat being LGBT or brown or some other born-with-it attribute that's perfectly normal. Thus, any attempt to manage the symptoms of a mental illness is seen as "changing who you are" on the order of ex-gay therapy or some shit.

And well, let's just say there's a reason we call them mental illnesses instead of mental personality traits or mental superpowers. These disorders are not a normal and healthy part of the human experience like homosexuality is; they are, in fact, serious problems whose symptoms need to be managed so that the patient can lead as full and happy a life as possible. And that is not achieved by outright encouraging maladaptive and dangerous behaviors and shitty coping mechanisms, while rejecting any attempts at symptom management as "ableism."

It's especially prevalent against the simplest of advice. For instance, a very common piece of (hella good) advice for people with disorders that encourage isolation and stagnation (depression, various anxiety disorders, avoidant personality disorder, etc.) is as simple as making yourself get bathed and dressed in the morning and doing simple maintenance on your living space (wash the dishes, take out the trash/recycling, etc.).

I can tell you firsthand this is important as hell; depression in my case makes me feel sluggish and worthless and it's very easy to get into a rut of "fuck it" and spend all day housebound and still in my pyjamas. Because I have so little energy or desire to expend it, that going out to do what needs done feels like I'm being told to climb Everest. Forcing myself to get washed and dressed first thing in the morning gets me over that hurdle. It prevents me from curling up in that ditch and turning off the world.

This is not a "bootstraps" argument. Getting dressed in the morning does not cure depression, nor does being able to get dressed in the morning mean I don't still have it. What it means is that I've made it over a very important hurdle very early in the day, so if I have to do something else that requires pants? I'll be less likely to shirk the task because hey, already got pants! But to the Tumblr crowd, this is "internalized ableism" because having depression is something I can't control and the rest of the world should understand that.

Welp, allow me to answer in a way they'll be able to process it:

Because again, depression is not a personality trait. It's a mental illness. It has symptoms which adversely affect daily life, and those symptoms need to be managed. Not to achieve some arbitrary definition of "normal" but because the symptoms of depression are highly unpleasant themselves. Managing them is part of feeling better and happier.

Encouraging other people to engage in harmful behavior patterns because you personally like using your all too often self-misdiagnosed alphabet soup mental illness as an excuse to get out of doing shit you don't want to do? That is ableism. Worse, actually.

We need to have frank discussions about mental illness because we need it to be seen as an illness rather than a character flaw. What these Tumblr types are doing is exactly the opposite; they are treating the illness as a character trait that cannot and should not be changed and overcome.

That is not the conversation we need to be having. Please, cut it the fuck out.