The desire to be sad: the tumblr side of mental illness

The fact that there was no answer to the question when he screamed : “Why do I suffer? Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such, he wills it and even seeks it out, provided he is shown meaning for it, the purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering, was the curse that laid over mankind so far.

Between the ages of 11-14, I was like many emotional preteens, riding an emotional dip in life where I was extremely insecure about my weight and being judged by other kids. I wasn't allowed to sleepover, keep my phone for extended periods of time, and go to the mall without an adult. My relationship with my parents was always rocky. It felt as if they never trusted me, and I would never be a good enough daughter. One of the ways I tried to disperse these thoughts were by diary entries.

Needless to say, I sounded pitiful in these entries, like I required some help, but here is the kicker :  I was a fraud. Yes, i was sad a lot,  Yes, i had low self esteem, but i was not suicidal then. I never had a real panic attack in classes (as I would descriptively state in my diary entries). It is embarrassing to acknowledge how I once acted.

Being chronically on Tumblr for an extended period of my preteens made me desire to be sad. Tumblr, the blog version of twitter, made being sad an essential part of what made you interesting and so it led to the romanticization of mental illness. Tumblr allowed me, and several others, to mashochitely indulge in self pain because of attention, support and the 'you’re so relatable' comments. Opening the dash, I was bombarded by girls with sad eyes, black hair and an aura of one wisened by sickness. And, oh how I wished to be a part of them.

When I was a little girl, I thought that everything, all the abuse and neglect, it somehow made me special.  And I decided that one day, I would write something that would make little girls like me feel less alone.

And if I ever write that book (from the words of a troubled 11 year old girl diary):

“I plant all my frustrations and words I'm dying to tell someone—anyone—away deep down inside of me.”

Wow. I thought I was quite the little poet, didn't I. You know, I thought that in order to give my sad emotions meaning, I had to make my sadness sound “right.” I couldn't just scribble down diary entries however I wanted with simple language and basic sentence structure. I needed my thoughts and feelings to be beautiful because that's the only time I saw society value mental illness: when it was delivered to us in the form of aesthetic art. In fact, I felt that to be deep and introspective, I needed to be sad. 

I had to be lonely and pessimistic in order to be truly enlightened about real life.

These beliefs I held were heavily influenced by the sad art I consumed.

If it came down to music, artists like Mitski and Lana Del Ray had a heavy impact and when it comes to TV shows and films, it’s a special and powerful type of communication because it's not limited to one sensory input. Film engages both our sight and hearing, which puts us in a trance or dissociative state similar to a dream, causing the viewer to become so deeply absorbed into the film.

For those who don't know anyone struggling with a mental illness, watching a film about mental illness will play a huge role in how they perceive real people with mental illness. But to make an enjoyable movie, especially for a younger audience, filmmakers want attractive characters with interesting plot and memorable lines. This means that many serious films about mental illness must incorporate unrealistic aesthetics into the project.

In the film Girl Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen is a character who is in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. The script is filled with poetic lines. In one popular scene that was reshared a lot on Tumblr and Instagram, Susanna says something which makes this suicidal woman sound like a depressed poet. She's attractive, she speaks like an insightful poet, and one of the male nurses in her ward ends up falling in love with her. I find that one of the common ways films and shows romanticize mental illness is by adding in a love interest. 

For example, another highly popular TV show with mentally ill characters was American Horror Story. Tate tells his therapist that he is interested in a girl, Violet, based off of their first interaction where he catches her harming herself and then tells her how to harm herself permanently. Violet, the girl Tate loves, even commits suicide because he asked her to. American Horror Story fans called it romantic and shipped them like no tomorrow. But if he would’ve done it for her, she would've been condemned, cursed, called an ‘unfair bitch’ just to eventually be killed of by the writers. 

Constantly surrounded by this kind of media, it made me want to be the mentally complex girl who attracted love because of my deep insight on life. I was scared of not being able to relate to sad songs and quotes anymore. I didn't want to enjoy life and be satisfied with myself because I believed that would make me stupid, and boring, and blind to harsh reality.  So many great artists I learned about had dark histories of alcoholism, or depression, or abuse, and all the songs that were considered artistic were created from a negative place.

I have so much respect for those people. But does being sad and mentally ill really make you more creative and deep? There appears to be many past studies that think so. 

For example, in 1995, a study by Ludwig examined the biographies of 1005 accomplished people in a variety of fields, including academic, business, artistic, social, activist, military, and athletic fields. He claimed to find that writers, actors, artists, and musicians had the most “psychiatric difficulty” but also the highest levels of creativity, 

But one big problem connects all these studies: there is no universally agreed upon understanding of "creativity" nor "mental illness." Storr defined creativity as a dynamic of normal drives to play. Independence was mentioned by Andreasen and Glick, and fluency and flexibility were cited by Jamison as essential to creativity. Rothenberg defined creativity as the ability to simultaneously conceive opposites or antithesis. Weisberg stressed that creativity required hard work and collaboration.`` Defining “mental illness” runs into the same problem.

It's hard to trust whether these supposed associations that these studies found between mental illness and creativity actually exist. In fact, more recent studies proposed that the mentally ill seem more drawn to the arts because they offer methods of expression and catharsis. It's not that mental illness biologically wires your brain to be more creative. Art is just an appealing avenue for those who hold such passionate emotions. Once artists heal from their illness, studies find that they tend to create and enjoy their art even more. Any artistic product though, begs an audience.

I feel stuck in a tricky spot because I don't know what to say about the morals of sad art. On the one hand, many philosophers and psychologists talk about how aesthetics and sad art are extremely important. It may provide catharsis, help you feel less alone, find beauty in hard times, or express feelings that you never could. It can provide unique positive emotions that happy or neutral music struggles to, such as nostalgia or calm. But is this the case for everyone, or only the mentally healthy?

I remember when I was constantly sad, I pretty much only listened to sad and angry music because paradoxically, I wanted to reaffirm the sadness in me. I was scared of what would happen if I became happier.

There's this one part from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil where he says, “It almost determines the order of rank how profoundly human beings can suffer, Profound suffering makes it noble; it separates.” And I truly believed that.

The more I suffered, the more profound I must be. I don't want to blame artists who release sad content because there is undeniable value in it and they don't control how people interpret their art.

How could I not feel a sense of beauty attached to it? Is tragically beautiful art immoral?

Or is it unfair to label art as moral or immoral if the artist is not responsible for every single person that consumes their art?

Is it only healthy for some people to consume sad art? 

I. Don't. Know.

If I had stayed away from Tumblr communities that romanticized mental illness and convinced me that without sadness, I wasn't interesting. I may not have been suicidal and I may not have been clinically depressed, but:

I was sad. And Tumblr only made me want to stay sad.

Maybe it was unavoidable. Maybe Tumblr and tragically beautiful art was only fueling what already existed inside me. 

This phenomenon of desiring illness isn't new by any means. In the 1800s, tuberculosis was widely romanticized. Tuberculosis had awful symptoms of coughing up blood, significant weight loss, intense fatigue and eventually death. But the illness was addressed with an air of “tragic loveliness.” 19th century popular literature depicted tuberculosis as the illness of a beautiful young artist, who despite their suffering, continued to engage in painting, music, and other artistic and intellectual activities. This became known as the aesthetic of the "faded flower" that so many young girls tried to actually strive for.

Young women began to purposely try to appear frail, thin, and pale.

Physical illness became understood and so it was demystified. There was no mystery surrounding tuberculosis anymore, and with that curious mystery gone, its charm was also lost. Slowly, people stopped romanticizing it.

Today, rarely do people romanticize physical illness the way they do with mental illness because our knowledge of physical illness is quite comprehensive, but mental illness has now taken the position of mystery. There's still a lot we don't understand about the mind and so it leaves room for people to create their own perceptions and imaginations.

Maybe, as medical knowledge about mental illness evolves, it too will lose its charm. I think we, as women, can only hope and pray that once this eventual mystery is unshrouded it may lose it’s chokehold on young girls who force an aura of sadness just to belong to a group that may have nothing of value to add.