The trend of falsely portraying anxiety and depression threatens the already fragile well-being of more young people than ever before.
A quick search of #depressed on Instagram brings up over 12 million posts. Interspersed between black and white photos and gifs of crying cartoons are pictures of pretty girls smoking and the occasional sadboi-with-tattoo overlaid with text like "Help me" and "I want to go far away … forever."
These romanticized depictions of mental illness are what mental health professional Aditi Verma calls “beautiful suffering”: a meme-ified version of mental illness that reduces anxiety and depression to a temporary feeling capable of being depicted through dark edits and simplified text.
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