Name a More Iconic Duo, I'll Wait: Memes and Mental Health
Meme source: Reddit
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of memes. Hilarious, painfully self-aware, and culturally significant, the art of meme-making has been mastered by the Gen Zs. And if memes are the engines that keeps them going, the fuel might just be the uncertainties of a future that’s already wrecked by climate change, the pandemic, and political unrest in the forms of protests and wars.
Memes are signifiers of our zeitgeist: snapshots of our own historical moments as we live through them, unsure of what the world is going to throw at us next. A bleak reality calls for equally bleak comedy.
Feeling Seen
It’s easy to feel alone when you’re struggling with your mental health: when it feels like your brain is actively working against you, when everything seems doomed to fail, and as the Gen Zs put it, you’re “spiralling”. And then a meme appears. It accurately describes your circumstances and puts to words and images how you feel specifically, and you realise you aren’t the only one feeling this way.
So it’s perhaps not an uncommon thing to do, to lie curled in a foetal position on one’s bed late at night, scrolling through memes on our social media of choice. It’s not exactly healthy, but yet we do it anyway for the occasional chuckle, and that brief flicker of connection between ourselves and the meme creator as we think, “LOL, relatable”.
Besides receiving a dopamine hit from getting a meme, we feel seen in our suffering. Speaking about PTSD and trauma memes, Bessel van der Kolk, in conversation with Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett at The Guardian, says that “trauma is usually about shame and secrecy [...] The way to actually deal with trauma is very much to find people who are there with you and who support you.”
Meme source: Reddit
Normalising mental health
Memes about mental health are also, as I have come to realise, moments of vulnerability coated with a layer of humour. Gone to therapy? Taking medication? In the psych ward? Humour rounds out all the sharp edges and corners, the stigma and negative associations, so that we all can laugh about a shared experience, and in that split second feel seen.
The more we agree that something, anything — from ADHD to Zyprexa — exists, the more we are able to normalise talking about it.
Meme source: Reddit
Being vulnerable with negative emotions
Perhaps it might be hard to take a meme like the above seriously, but at least it normalises that we all feel quite bad sometimes. This, I reckon, is especially true outside of the realm of mental health disorders, where we are pressured into feeling a 100% all of the time: if we don’t feel great and aren’t hyper-productive, society tells us, then there’s something wrong with us.
Some say that suffering is pain multiplied by resistance, but if our unhappiness is within the acceptable range of everyday emotions, we shouldn’t have to resist it at all. Negative emotions arise because of negative events, and there are plenty in the world: a perfectly normal response to a life that, no matter how hard we try, isn’t going to be normal (for what is normalcy, anyway?
And if nothing works out, perhaps humour will be the next best thing. Humour as a coping mechanism isn’t new — it’s a type of response to a world or brain that has gone awry. Humour also allows us to be vulnerable in the moments that we need to be. So, post and laugh away! After all, it’s proven that laughing helps lessen stress, and helps you relax and recharge.