You open your phone, you choose the poison of your choice and you like, update, share, subscribe, scroll into this deep abyss of extremes where your every feeling was been worded by a broken hearted writer, every side of your humour coloured by your favourite meme page and your every single nagging feeling of dread, your inability to sleep just once; the jitters you got before you stepped on the stage; turned into a very tumultuous threatening form of some or the other mental illness that one might find.
Social media was supposed to be every individual’s guide to this new, fast world of 140-character tweets and Facebook rants, and it indeed is all that. But what we seemed to forget was the concrete impact it had on our belief systems, how it has slowly coiled our moral compasses and how did it ever so slightly start guiding our thoughts into affirmative actions without any realisation!
Although it is true that social media has brought mental illnesses to the forefront of the social discussion and made it a topic of interest in even those who once considered it to be a taboo but there seems to be a dangerously cynical viewpoint which takes these very mental illnesses, one that plagues the lives of so many and turns it into a very romanticised, polished notion of reality where not being able to sleep is termed pure love and having depression is just another trait that every artist has! Why is it in today’s world that anxiety, insomnia and depression are mere hashtags in individuals’ Instagram posts while dengue, jaundice etc aren’t?
How did illness turn into lifestyle tags?
Shakespeare once said “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players”, and on this stage of social media we tend to portray an image of ourselves which in simpler terms is “away from normal”(Everyone who has studied abnormal psychology gets the joke); and to fit in the online personas of our own making we act in any and every way which gets us more retweets and likes without even realising that what we portray today on social media is sadly taken to be the pure truth. I don’t believe anyone would like to be identified as a paranoid schizophrenic in real life juts because they once wrote “Heard my parents yelling at me and they aren’t even here LOL”; Auditory Hallucinations are nothing to joke about, or maybe they are the voice in my head won’t let me decide…!
Does it makes any sense? No…???
#IllnessesAren’tHashtags
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