In seventh grade, I became severely depressed. It was the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and I was isolated nearly every day. I tried to internalize my emotions until they bubbled into outbursts, which was often, and I had difficulty explaining my feelings. But while I struggled to communicate, the internet had an abundance to say about my condition. 

In the past decade, youth mental health conditions have plummeted, with emergency visits for disorders doubling and visits for suicide-related symptoms increasing by five times. Currently, 17.4% of American teenagers experience a mental disorder and suicide is the fourth leading cause of death among 15–29 year-olds. A 2021 study identified social media use as a key cause of these increases, as teenagers who spend more than three hours on social media every day are twice as likely to develop depression and anxiety symptoms.

The immense impact social media has in promoting mental disorders is no surprise. A couple of minutes of scrolling on any platform yields an overwhelming tangle of sensationalized depictions of mental illness. It’s become “popular;” not a serious mood disorder, but desirable, often portrayed as quirky, relatable, or darkly romantic.

Trends are diverse and accessible on platforms of all kinds, but a major commonality through all of them is that they contort the realities of mental illness. Depression and anxiety have become “depressioncore” and “anxietycore,” aesthetics that dramatize and beautify the disorders with artsy photos of the rain, nighttime, crying anime characters, and gloomy bedrooms. Content creators film themselves with trembling hands to illustrate the severity of their anxiety or lying in bed during depressive episodes. On the flip side, “bedrotting,” when people stay in bed to avoid outside pressure, has become a cute and cozy trend of happily relaxing in a 

made-up bed all day. Hashtags under these posts add an unserious tone with the likes of #lonely, #mentallystruggling, and #sad, which collectively have millions of uses.

The widespread usage of social media also acts as a conduit for books, television, and music that also romanticize mental illnesses. “BookTok,” a TikTok community primarily dedicated to young adult novels, shares popular book series like “The Royals” and “A Court of Thorns and Roses” which depict depression and controlling and toxic relationships with underlying messages of “fixing” these problems with romance to their adolescent audiences. Clips of shows and movies that glamorize mental illness by making it out to be a weapon for revenge (“13 Reasons Why”), beautiful and tragic (“Euphoria” and “Looking for Alaska”), or darkly powerful (“Joker”). Music also plays a role; Taylor Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” birthed a series of toxic trends by playing on tropes, insinuating that artists are depressed or anxious with its title and black-and-white photos of Swift spread across a bed in contemplative angst. 

Thus, a pattern has emerged in social media users where their attraction to the glamorized depiction of mental disorders causes them to view the conditions as unique and special. A 2023 study brands this phenomenon as “psychosomatic social contagion,” which emphasizes the infectious appeal of the trend, especially among teenagers. 

How disgustingly inaccurate. 

When I lie in bed, it’s not an indulgent break. I feel trapped. During meltdowns and panic attacks, my head doesn’t fill with gloomy music and imagery. My sadness is not graceful agony, it’s ugly and blunt, and during a depressive episode, my first instinct is not to put my phone on a tripod and record my sadness. 

Broadly, the Mayo Clinic describes symptoms of mental illness as persisting mood changes, feelings of guilt, hopelessness, uncontrollable stress, and variation in eating and sleeping habits. None of these are accurately represented in modern social media; in fact, they’re minimized through the sugarcoating of disorders. Content like this misrepresents people like me and reduces the gravity of mental illnesses. 

It’s natural that social media is such an effective conduit for the sharing of these harmful ideas due to its modern format. TikToks, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts—the most popular social media platforms for youth—have rapid-fire, attention-span-shortening formats that encourage content creators to sensationalize their content in order to make their fleeting screen time memorable. Thus, dramatized and occasionally misinformed content is forced upon users, cloaking the less stimulating fact that mental illness is not a cute little quirk or tragically beautiful flaw. 

I understand the desire to form communities for support for illnesses like these, although connecting with strangers on the internet is not as fulfilling or safe as in-person connections, as it can be the only available outlet for some. However, distorting the realities of actual disorders for clicks is unacceptable. It’s heavily misinformed and spreads false ideas to young and impressionable audiences. 

The social media web is sticky and unavoidable, and it’s unlikely that sweeping changes will be made to digital content any time soon. So, the next time you scroll through your default time killer, remember this: stability doesn’t make you boring, and self-imposed agony isn’t cool. Real people aren’t tortured poets.