Microprocessing
When Mental Illness Memes Stop Being Funny
Online humor can be therapeutic, but it must be shared in certain ways
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“The worst thing I ever did for my mental health was treat my depression, anxiety, or suicidal ideation as a relatable meme,” wrote @trashcommunist on Twitter. “Destigmatize these things yes but don’t make light of them, getting help is way cooler than not.”
@trashcommunist’s observation immediately caught my attention. As someone with an anxiety disorder, I’ve often found great joy in anxiety-related memes, which add humor to an experience that can be very painful in the moment. But for the makers and viewers of these memes, these attempts at levity might have a negative effect on their mental health.
There are two differentiating factors between a harmful meme and an innocuous one: disclosure from the person sharing the meme, and the type of humor within it. Decades’ worth of research has shown that generally speaking, humor is very good for people’s mental health—including people with mental illness. One particularly moving study, from 2017, looked at the effect of humor on people with mental illness in a homeless shelter. The study author found that a robust culture of humor brought joy and dignity to the people who lived there. The guests’ jokes were often aimed at the shelter’s more privileged volunteers and employees and were what many people might consider crude or offensive, but they helped level the playing field between the different people at the shelter. They also made it easier for guests and shelter workers to discuss mental illness and other serious issues by opening a door into those conversations and allowing people to address difficult topics like drug addiction, AIDS and HIV, and homelessness without taking them “too seriously.”
A similar study, from 2009, looked at the ways patients (which the study called “consumers”) in a psychiatric hospital used humor and its effect on their illness and experience at the hospital. Typically, humor smoothed the relationship between service providers, like doctors and nurses, and consumers by placing everyone on equal footing. The jokes, which the consumers often made at the expense of service providers, helped the consumers feel a sense of control over…
