Some of the first things taught in suicide prevention training — Question, Persuade and Refer — are the warning signs of someone planning to take their life. One of the most common warning signs is someone joking about how they are going to end their life. Teens say things like, “I’m going to kill myself if I don’t ace this test.” Every day, students make these jokes to cope with stress — some make them to be funny, while others are genuinely reaching out for a hand. As a result, the line blurs between people who are joking and those who are actually calling for help.
As much as I criticize these behaviors, I am guilty of engaging in them as well. The need to fit in can easily override common sense. I find myself making jokes or saying things that I instantly wish I could take back. In the same vein where people rethink joining trends and overconsuming products, I regret following the crowd and joking along with them.
Humor can be a useful coping mechanism because it is a catharsis for the pain and anxiety that comes with psychological disorders, and has been proved to put a smile on your face, according to the National Library of Medicine. There are obviously some positives to humor. But as the saying goes, all that glitters is not gold.
Happiness is the glittering feeling from joking around. But, on the other hand, when jokes are made about serious topics like mental health, the jokes can further perpetuate harmful ideas and preexisting stigmas. Through humor, you communicate that you think mental health is a joke, even if you don’t believe that. And there it is — the fake gold.
On social media platforms, mental health trends follow similar patterns to tokens of overconsumption: Owalas, Needohs and Labubus. And as with many popular things, there needs to be a clear line drawn before things go too far.
Recently, influencers have been more open about their mental health struggles, improving how the public views mental health. This effect leads to a greater acceptance of mental health due to the greater availability of information. In 2021, popular YouTuber KallMeKris posted a video discussing her obsessive compulsive disorder, anorexia and depression, with the video reaching nearly 3.5 million views as of 2026. Considering her audience includes teens who might be battling similar struggles, she did an amazing job by opening up a space for discussion about these topics.
This exposure to mental health is helping more and more teens understand themselves and how their brains work. If there weren’t the information and language available today to explain my diagnoses and show that other people have the same struggles, I would feel alone.
Unfortunately, the spread of information also causes more people to hold distorted perceptions of how people with mental health conditions really are. This is how stereotypes originate. For example, people still think that schizophrenic people are aggressive and people with personality disorders are just looking for attention.
This trend of people holding distorted perceptions also makes room for the rise of over-pathologizing — the tendency to mislabel normal human experiences as symptoms of a mental illness. According to Jennifer Katzenstein, the director of psychology, neuropsychology and social work at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, “The open discussions on social media provide [adolescents] with relatable content, fostering a sense of belonging and reducing the feeling of isolation.”
Reducing isolation can be important for the growth of adolescent development. However, the negatives of over-pathologizing cause more teens to spread misinformation about these disorders. This also leads to the idea of labels changing to be more generalized.
Nowadays, having autism is more seen as having some quirks and just being a little bit silly. And bipolar is just seen as being a bit depressed and happy every so often. The internet is feeding this idea that if your traits fit into the narrow category of “symptoms,” then you automatically have said disorder. This notion is completely erasing the struggles behind having an illness and struggling day to day with it. Because to have a disorder, it has to affect your life for longer than two seconds.
Alongside the stigma surrounding labels changing, the words used to categorize mental disabilities are changing alongside it. Now people are using the term “overstimulated” when in reality, they are just overwhelmed. Hobbies are being replaced with hyperfixations. And no, you are not acting a bit manic right now. These are words, all associated with psychological disorders, that 23.1% of the US population struggles with daily.
To quote one of my favorite YouTubers, Candycourn, “The misuse of disability language online is literally redefining these words in harmful ways, downplaying the very disabling aspects of these terms into fun sentence enhancers.” There is some advantage to regularizing the language used to describe disabilities, but there comes a point where it is normalized to the point where most of society is using terms that weren’t meant for them. When words are used incorrectly, they are being used to spread misinformation. Even if the goal isn’t to spread misinformation, it can still be hurtful to communities that benefit from specified language.
Everyone has tendencies that will fit into some sort of disorder category; it’s just human nature. The difference between these tendencies and actual disorders is how much these symptoms are impacting someone. According to the DSM-5, the symptoms need to be distressing, deviant and dysfunctional.
Distressing means that the behavior you are exhibiting is actively causing harm to yourself or others. Deviant is when your actions go against the cultural norms of your society. And dysfunctional means that it is impacting your life in such a way that it is hard to function.
There is a difference between someone bouncing their leg when bored and feeling like their brain will shut down if they don’t incorporate some movement into their daily life. Someone who needs to engage in self-stimulatory behaviors, also known as stimming, cannot go without fidgeting or shaking their hands. Stimming is not something that only neurodivergent individuals do, but it is more necessary to them. So, the feeling associated with stimming that is not present is considered distressing and dysfunctional.
Online, the only parts of having mental disabilities I am seeing being destigmatized are the parts that are considered “quirky.” For example, people with autism are still being shunned for doing things that are considered “weird.” Riddle me this: if everybody nowadays thinks that they are autistic, why aren’t the real struggles faced by these people also brought into the light? If everybody were actually a little bit autistic, then don’t you think there would be more changes in our society to accommodate autism?
This isn’t the case with just autism. This is being seen everywhere with other disorders like depression, ADHD, OCD, bipolar disorder and more. People are only taking the “fun” parts of the disorders and generalizing them to fit a wider audience. And they are doing this under the illusion of care. If everybody cared about people who have these disabilities as much as they care about faking the disorder online for attention, then society wouldn’t be turning such a blind eye.
It is getting harder and harder to validate if someone online has what they say they have. This separation that the screen in front of us is allowing people to get away with spreading misinformation, whether they know it or not.
While highlighting disabilities is allowing for greater awareness, the spotlight being put on them is slowly turning dark. The media had an idea, and people ran with it as if it were fact, not fiction. This is why it is so important to consume media that accurately portrays mental illness and not believe everything you see online.
