There is also a concern regarding "reduction", or the improper simplification of the matter about suicide. You might have seen memes that make fun of teenagers talking about their depression or declaring that they will commit suicide because no one loves them or that they are a burden to their families.
Suicide thoughts are not something to be made fun of, but honestly, I can't blame the memes. Partly true—a lot of people reduce the relevance of depression into mere sadness. There is this overwhelming reduction which you might have experienced yourself. Some people are suffering from depression, which outsiders view as "attention-seeking" or "too demanding", to which people respond with ignorance, dismissal, or toxic positivity. This is the culture that most of us are surrounded with. So when our adolescents, who are at the height of their emotional imbalance, experience sadness, neglect, humiliation or other circumstances as the memes say, they interpret this as depression, and make misinformed declarations.
And, there are these insensitive adults who mock them. We've all been teenagers, and we know that teenagers make a lot of mistakes. No one was a perfect teenager with a built-in philosophy in life immune from all kinds of attacks. Take note how I use the term "misinformed"—this is because teenagers are normally curious, confused, and physiologically prone to emotional imbalance. So, instead of mocking them, our responsibility as adults is to inform them, motivate them, open them, and teach them peace.
Source: FreeRangeStock
Also, because of this culture, the legit depressed people become more afraid to speak up and seek help. Because depression is being made fun of and that being depressed is frowned at, a lot of people remain undiagnosed. You know, people mock depression due to lack of education, depressed people not speaking up, people being locked up to their lack of education, depressed people locked up to their fears—they feed off each other, so the loop cannot be broken.
I'm not siding with the memes. I'm just saying that there is some reason these memes exist, and we have to understand that in order to correct what's wrong. I'd like to view this matter as a lack of mental health education to our youth. From this point, I believe we should try to educate our youth about mental health so that they become strong adults, so that they can help people in need, and so that these social stigma backing up these memes be finally eradicated.
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