A Critical Look at Mental Health in a Digital Age

by Hanna P.

It’s no secret that there’s a mental health crisis right now. According to Mental Health America, 20.78% of adults in America were reported with some mental illness from 2019-2020. 4.84% of American adults, experienced suicidal thoughts. 

With social media expanding by the minute, it’s become easier than ever to talk about our struggles. With this, comes unproductive trends like therapy-speak in non-therapy online spaces, new ways to stigmatize mental illness, and harmful ideas surrounding therapy and mental health advocacy. While social media is often seen as and can be a useful tool to destigmatize mental health, the modern social media landscape has also hurt how people approach conversations surrounding mental health today.

The Issue of Therapy-Speak

Therapy-speak can be described, simply, as the use of therapy terms in non-therapy contexts. This can lead to the overuse or misuse of these terms; which, when used by non-professionals, can lead to these terms’ meanings getting distorted, or losing their significance altogether. An especially common instance of this is referring to someone that is overly organized as OCD. This can cause people to associate OCD with being overly organized rather than the actual disorder. In a similar vein, something seen frequently on TikTok involves people referring to their impulsive thoughts as intrusive. Intrusive thoughts are a symptom of OCD, however, misusing the term removes its meaning from the disorder. 

A TikTok of a person painting their treadmill pink, referring to this as an ‘intrusive’ thought in the caption.

A TikTok of someone randomly meowing in class, describing this as an ‘intrusive’ thought.

Therapy-speak can be dangerous as it can affect our regular interactions with others. This can cause people to expect their interactions with family, friends, acquaintances, or coworkers to be similar to the interactions they may have with a therapist. The boundaries between a therapist and client are meant to foster a safe and healthy environment for effective therapy, but these boundaries can’t be applied to family or friends because the relationship’s different: you’re not paying them, and their job isn’t necessarily to help you heal the way a therapist’s job is. Some therapists see the use of therapy terms in non-therapy settings like this as a defensive mechanism, focusing on these pathologizing terms to describe their feelings rather than actually digging into what these feelings are.

The “Right” Way to be Mentally Ill

The social aspect of social media has traditionally been seen as a tool for good in the realm of mental health, helping to destigmatize conversations surrounding mental illness. While this has certainly been done, there’s another layer of stigmatization that has been borne out of this. Under the guise of mental health advocacy, mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety have been romanticized in an attempt to attach some relatability to them, while more extreme symptoms of disorders such as bipolar and schizophrenia that may not be as universally relatable have been stigmatized even further, as they cannot be romanticized in the same way.

Depression is one of the most common disorders for a person to have. In 2019, the World Health Organization reported 280 million people as being diagnosed with some form of depression, with that number growing dramatically in 2020 with the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic. So, conversations surrounding depression are bound to happen in online spaces, and can be a way for people to relate to one another. However, these conversations are often sanitized and get shut down when they turn too ‘ugly’. A recent trend on TikTok that’s been dubbed ‘bedrotting’ consists of people talking about the experience of staying in bed and doing nothing, which can be indicative of a depression symptom. This trend, however, has been twisted in a way that has made bedrotting something that is desirable, furthering it from the uglier symptoms of genuine depression.

A TikTok of someone describing ‘bedrotting’ as someone enjoying the time they have in bed.

A TikTok of people spending time with their friends lying in bed, calling this ‘bedrotting’.

When symptoms of mental illness become less lighthearted and more extreme, it is no longer digestible enough for the public on social media, and instead gets shamed and stigmatized. Those with severe anxiety symptoms are deemed off-putting and strange, those with concerning intrusive thoughts are called immoral and demonized for thoughts they cannot control, and those with unhygienic depressive symptoms are criticized for their gross behavior as though it’s intentional.

A tweet by user @planetarydyke on Twitter saying “‘omg depression can get so bad people can’t brush their teeth???’ people’s depression gets so bad they kill themselves Janet”

While therapy-speak has led to people calling their impulsive thoughts intrusive, actual intrusive thoughts have gotten moral criticism; this is due to a lack of understanding of what intrusive thoughts actually are. Intrusive thoughts are considered intrusive because they are unwanted and often extremely socially unacceptable thoughts that someone with disorders such as OCD may have against their own will. To shame someone for these symptoms that are already so difficult to cope with only furthers the stigma against mental illness and makes people less likely to want to speak on the truth of their disorders.

A comment on a TikTok of a person talking about having intrusive thoughts relating to hurting children saying that this isn’t normal (note that the original poster did not imply that these were non-disordered thoughts).

Therapy as a Fix-All

With conversations surrounding mental health being so popularized today, the opinion on therapy has shifted as well. It’s more common nowadays to not only see people normalizing therapy, but actually suggesting it as something that everyone should engage in; it can be seen as maintenance for the mind, similar to how someone may have health check-ups for their body. This ignores the fact that there are so many different kinds of therapy, and not all of them work the same way. Someone with NPD or ASPD is not going to respond to simple talk therapy the same way someone without any mental disorders would respond. These same standards just can’t be applied to everyone.

One of the most prominent drawbacks to promoting therapy as something universally essential is that, unfortunately, therapy is expensive. Saying that everyone needs therapy perpetuates the harmful idea that everyone can afford it, which is America, is certainly not the case. Mental Health America reported that, in 2023, 42% of adults could not receive the mental health treatment they needed due to financial constraints. Therapy isn’t something that is readily accessible to a large portion of this country. So, this perspective that therapy is something essential that everyone should have comes from a privileged standpoint, making it inherently flawed, even if therapy could theoretically benefit everyone to an extent.

Mental Health, Unfiltered

The rise of influencer culture has put public figures at the forefront of the mental health conversation. Celebrities and influencers are put on pedestals and their experiences are made a spectacle. The fame of influencers comes from their sharing of the supposed ‘unfiltered’ parts of their lives. However, these parts are still heavily filtered to fit a certain image that their audience wants to see; anything shared beyond that is bound to face criticism and controversy. Rachel Zegler, an actress who has recently faced both love and hate from social media over her public personality, spoke up in a YouTube video about her struggles with mental health in 2021. When talking about how facing hateful comments online has been affecting her mental health and being transparent about how she’s been feeling lately, she says, “And maybe that’s too vulnerable, and maybe people will use it against me. But this is the Internet, so what can I expect other than that?”.

This expectation of the filtered-unfiltered life that public figures are meant to provide their audience has also caused celebrities to feel pressure to talk publicly about their mental health when they may not feel comfortable doing so. The media almost always sensationalizes the mental health struggles of celebrities for clicks. Professional tennis player Naomi Osaka wrote an essay for Time magazine detailing her feelings relating to this; she talks about wanting privacy but not getting it because of this pressure to disclose her mental health publicly. 

While opening up about one’s own mental health can be a great way to destigmatize it, social media still shows a curated form of people’s lives, and thus, their mental health struggles. It is not possible to portray the true reality of mental health when you are in complete control of how you are viewed. Social media is changing the way we are talking about mental health, illness, and therapy, and it may not be for the better.