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0 By Samantha Jones
I see it all the time, friends posts are always of the happy times but never show the true them, the ups and downs of life. For many years I refrained from posting about my mental health on social media due to the stigma attached to it.
Then one day I thought ‘but this isn’t me, it isn’t a true reflection of my life’. Granted that people don’t actually want to admit that they are having a ‘bad day’ and they most certainly don’t want their friends knowing this. However, I make my social media pages a place to express my feelings, whether that be good or bad. When the happy times come I make people aware of how good I am feeling and they like it, they like it a lot.
When it comes to me expressing the dark times in my life, all my ‘friends’ seem to disappear like they haven’t even acknowledged my post. This doesn’t make me sad though because I know that they have read it and if it secretly helps just one of my ‘friends’ that would make me feel like my post achieved something.
It is hard to know what to say when someone is depressed because most of the time I don’t even know what to say to myself. I would like for social media not to be just about the good times but also about the things that are going not so good. It is a false representation of the society we live in and I also think of the teenagers that are joining social media and possibly thinking ‘why are their lives so good when I feel sad?’ We need to bring these children up aware of what mental health is, so that if they need to, they can reach out for help before they are in what seems like a never ending cycle.
I would advise that next time you want to post about your mental health, just do it and don’t think about it. If someone criticises you for posting then they clearly don’t know how it feels to be plagued by the black dog and other mental illnesses.
UNITED STATES
UNITED KINGDOM
