The Romanticizing of Mental Health Struggles

Imagine you’re scrolling through Instagram or TikTok at night. Edits with sad songs and captions that seem deep and interesting. At first, it just seems like your average video. However, you begin to see how real mental health struggles are portrayed.  It’s just another video meant to be aesthetic,  and slowly the idea starts to seep into our minds. Being depressed or anxious is seen as an interesting personality trait or an accessory that makes you seem unique. 

Struggles and illnesses are glamorized into something that seems almost poetic. Pain seems desirable, like it is an aesthetic. It glosses over the exhausting, overwhelming aspects and paints mental health illnesses in a light of beauty, instead of seeing it for what it is. 

So,  why do we take something painful and try to make it seem beautiful? Part of the answer is our environment. Teenagers are susceptible to social influence and reward, and we live in a time where we are exposed to a plethora of content every day. When media that romanticizes mental illness earns many likes, it seems like just another trend. When we see that earning recognition, we feel like it is normal and we want to feed into it as well, relating to how we want to fit in with our peers. Posts like the ones we see on social media make sadness look poetic, and short-form content can’t capture all the complexities of mental illnesses.

When you are dealing with something difficult like depression or anxiety,  for example, you may want to feel heard and validated by those around you to justify your pain and feel less alone. It should be recognized that romanticizing your mental health struggles can be a coping mechanism for feeling misunderstood. But, there are better ways to cope with that. 

By romanticizing mental illness, serious terms get thrown around loosely. Wanting something to be clean and saying it’s OCD or going to a class you hate and calling it “PTSD” trivializes the experiences of someone who is actually facing those mental health struggles and disregards their pain. When a particular pain is portrayed online as poetic and deep, most people who don’t experience it that way can feel even more isolated. Nobody’s pain actually feels desirable in the moment. But if the media says it should, they feel even worse. This intensifies feelings of low self-worth and isolation because their reality doesn’t match the unrealistic aesthetics.

In the end, mental health struggles need to be normalized, not romanticized. It is a real part of our lives that can affect us in complex and painful ways. Making it seem beautiful is a rising issue, but ultimately, it just creates more misunderstanding and harm. We need to talk about mental health sincerely, not try to make it seem like something it isn’t. 

If you find yourself romanticizing your mental health, this does not mean something is wrong at all. This is actually a chance for you to improve your coping methods and find something that works for you! This can include journaling, talking to a friend, and more. Stay mindful of your thoughts and channel your feelings through different outlets to overall keep yourself in a positive headspace.

Illustrations by Aayushi S