Over the growing years, mental health has become a lot more of an open subject: opening up has become more popular and encouraged, more sources have become available, and it has become a hotter topic on social media. Whilst all this progress and stories being shared is good an eruption of people wanting those mental health issues has surfaced.
Munchausen syndrome is a psychological condition where someone pretends to be ill with full intention or even produces symptoms of illness in themselves, to be perceived as sick and like they have the disorder they desire. People with this syndrome express types of behaviour like pretending to have psychological symptoms, pretending to have physical symptoms, and actively trying to get ill. But why is this happening?
Due to the pandemic and people in isolation, there was a natural rise in the amount of people with mental disorders, for example, depression. Being isolated was the perfect growing ground for these mental and physical illnesses to flourish and become uncontrollable. The demand in help needed by healthcare providers, like the NHS, is still affecting them today. So, is this a reason why people want bad mental health? Has it provided almost a sort of safety net from the pandemic that people desire?
Romanticism of mental health can be widely seen on social media, proving that people have a very diverse understanding of what mental health is. People’s perception of mental illness is a spectrum of levels of understanding, verses misunderstanding. People can take their point of view to the extreme and claim that they are mentally ill without even understanding it, further romanticising the implications that follow the illness. Has the understanding of mental illnesses moved to the other side of the spectrum? Many people, especially on social media, are self-diagnosing themselves without understanding what they are saying. Contrastingly, people may even be receiving treatment for a mental illness they don’t have, which causes problems in the idea of people depending on drugs that they don’t need.
Regarding social media, people romanticise mental health to seem aesthetic and something that somebody should want; people are comparing and ‘competing’ with how bad their mental illnesses are. It is portrayed as glamorous and unique, when it destroys people’s lives and undermines the feelings that people have who struggle with their day-to-day life with mental illness. For example, people post Tik Tocks, highlighting their self-destruction, like ‘what I eat in a day’ and then show a low in quantity diet and labelling it as ‘aesthetic’, pushing a really damaging mindset onto people who see those videos. This is not to be confused with people who do struggle with mental illnesses and openly talk about it, which is an amazing progression that society has made to be less conservative of what people are going through.
How is this fixed?
To tackle the obsession with being mentally ill, children and teenagers should be more educated and be taught how to deal with mental health problems by going to healthcare professionals. It is amazing and extremely powerful to speak up and share what you are going through.
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