Meme Your Mental Health

Host Anna Borges (The More Or Less Definitive Guide to Self-Care), who was famously dragged on Twitter after making a few jokes in reference to mental health, revisits mental health meme culture and how it can be a useful tool to find community during dark times. She’s joined by Memes To Discuss In Therapy admin Priscilla Eva for a discussion on “shitposting,” finding the humor in our collective struggles and how social media can actually breed compassion for ourselves and for others. 

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Full Transcript

Anna Borges: They say that everyone remembers their first time—I know that I do. Slowly waking up in the morning. Bright light streaming in through the window…

 

…the sound of my phone rattling on the nightstand as a stream of notifications flooded in.

 

MUSIC PAUSE, PHONE VIBRATION SOUND EFFECT

 

Sorry, did you think I was talking about something else? Yeah, no, I’m talking about the first time I got absolutely dragged on the internet.

 

MUSIC

 

It was early 2016 and I was a writer at BuzzFeed. I’d been tasked with the challenge of finding a way to make mental health content shareable, and relatable, and viral. And that might sound like a ridiculously easy job in the year of our digital lord 2022, but it wasn’t that long ago that the landscape of mental health content looked very different than it does today. Like on big mainstream websites, it was pretty much limited to serious and earnest personal essays and serious and earnest resource articles. And everything else was kind of like… you know… niche. Like it existed, but just in certain corners of the internet.

 

So, I decided to try doing what I’d long done in my little corners of the internet, I joked about my depression.

 

And it did not go well.

 

RECORD SCRATCH, CROWD GASP, YOUNG GIRL SHOUTING “YOU NEED TO LEAVE”

 

The roundup in question was “21 Tweets About Depression That Might Just Make You Laugh.” A quintessential BuzzFeed list that I thought would make people laugh, and, you know, more importantly, maybe make them feel less alone.

 

And [laughs] man oh man, was I wrong. Instead, the comments and the emails and the tweets just came flooding in.

 

SOUNDS OF CROWD JEERING

 

Anonymous Commenter: “I feel physically sick after reading this. This post is horrible.”

 

Anonymous Commenter: “You clearly have no experience with depression if you think these are funny.”

 

Anna Borges: And, and I can’t emphasize how mild these tweets were. You know, it was stuff like, “It’s not called a nap, it’s called a depression sleep.” And like, “I can’t wait for my winter depression to end so I can get a start on my spring depression!” Just completely innocuous tweets that you would probably see seventeen of a day these days. And the comments just kept coming.

 

Anonymous Commenter: “This is disrespectful to people who actually struggle.”

 

Anonymous Commenter: “You have no business writing about mental health.”

 

Anonymous Commenter: “Depression isn’t funny. Period. It never will be!”

 

Anna Borges: And I couldn’t help but immediately panic and wonder if I’d made, like, some grave mistake. I was like, “Are they right? Was my chosen coping mechanism disrespectful and out of touch? Should I have kept it a shameful secret? What is wrong with me!?”

 

Was joking about my mental health really so wrong?

 

MOOD RING THEME MUSIC

 

I’m Anna Borges and this is Mood Ring, a practical guide to feelings…even when some people think your jokes about those feelings are pretty fucked up.

 

Every episode, we’re exploring one new way to cope — with our feelings, with our baggage, with our brain, with the internet or with the world around us.

 

Anna Borges: Today’s episode is about laughing about mental health. Our mental health. Specifically, laughing about our me