With the increase in social media and deteriorating attention spans, we've been trying to find reasons why our lives aren’t as perfect as everyone else’s. What if I told you it would take about 4 minutes to read this blog? Would it be a challenge? Although social media spreads awareness about mental health it also spreads misinformation, which often outweighs its benefits.
Everyone has behaviours that may be symptoms of most mental illnesses. It’s when these symptoms get severe that it’s called a mental illness. And these symptoms, more often than not, are essential parts of life and what makes us human.
For example, everyone gets anxious once in a while, due to certain things happening around us. It helps us be more aware of our surroundings and be prepared for anything bad that might happen. But just because someone faces these symptoms, it is not enough to be classified as clinical anxiety or an anxiety disorder. It’s just a part of experiencing emotions. Even if someone is regularly anxious that still doesn’t mean they have clinical anxiety. Clinical anxiety is when anxiety affects a person to perform day-to-day tasks due to a constant fear of danger all the time. It can involve having intense periods of fear and emotions called panic attacks and may cause physical symptoms like nausea and trouble sleeping. Sometimes individuals become physically unable to go outside and end up bedridden for unhealthily long periods of time. This is different from feeling anxious as anxiety, as an emotion, goes away after the threat is gone, unlike clinical anxiety which makes a person feel anxious even when there is no apparent danger around.
But most “educational” videos talking about mental illnesses don’t cover these vital points and some people consuming such content end up self-diagnosing themselves. Self-diagnosing is harmful as it puts the person in a state of mind of self-pity. Since they’re trying to get rid of a “mental illness” that doesn't exist, it restricts personal growth that they could've been doing instead. Self-diagnosed individuals who self-medicate can also unintentionally overdose, which can cause liver failure, seizures and even death.
Such content is not only harmful to people self-diagnosing themselves but also to people who have these mental illnesses. Since people form certain opinions regarding mental illnesses due to these videos, they think that mental illnesses aren't a big deal. They minimise the struggles these people go through, and thus to others, it seems that it is just to “seek attention”. This undoes the taboo in our society that inhibits us from talking about mental illness, into making it worse due to people preserving mental illnesses as a trend.
One of these mental illnesses is Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) which became a huge “trend” online, especially during the lockdown period, where people would dress up and act as different people, claiming that they had DID and that those were their different personalities.
Realistically, because people come from different economic and societal backgrounds, it is understandable why people don't get diagnosed. But even self-awareness can be done wisely by doing immense research online, talking to people who are diagnosed with the particular illness, talking to trusted adults with experience, limiting yourself to home remedies like avoiding certain foods, recording your thoughts, not using unprescribed medication and also having the benefit of the doubt until you end up getting a clinical diagnosis. Hence, it is important to get a professional’s opinion regarding your mental health, rather than jumping to conclusions by viewing limited content online.
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