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How Biases About Mental Illness Keep People From Seeking Help
A response to those misleading memes about “natural” remedies for depression
We’ve all seen the memes and social media posts. While variations exist, they’re basically the same idea: First, a picture of a forest, a field, or a garden with text that reads, “This is an antidepressant.” Below will be a photo of some pile of anonymous, colorful pills, with text saying, “This is shit.”
The point these memes are trying to make, of course, is that going outdoors and enjoying fresh air is a “natural” antidepressant, whereas taking a pill—a chemical, a drug—pollutes your brain and body. It’s shit. And with that comes the impression that people who take pills to treat mental illness, instead of just going outdoors, are shit too.
At least that’s how I felt when someone I know and love shared a meme like that on Facebook some years ago.
Somehow, seeing this hurt more than the time a Scientologist waved a pamphlet in my face while I was walking home from work and screamed about how psychiatry was an “industry of death.” It hurt more than the millions of jokes in every form of media about someone being “off their meds.”
It hurt more than when Pat Corcoran, who manages Chance the Rapper, an artist I have a great deal of love and respect for, tweeted this laundry list of things people have echoed to me my entire life.
It hurt more than the nebulous but pervasive idea that there’s a difference between taking medication to treat pain or dysfunction in some organs—the heart, the stomach, the dick—but not the brain, which is also just an organ.
It hurt more because it was a reminder that it’s not just some strangers who believe that the medications I take are somehow a con or a method of government control. It hurt because it was a reminder that people I love actually think this way, which makes me wonder how much they can ever actually love me.
