Let’s talk about romanticizing mental illness/neuroatypicality:
What it is:
- writing characters with 2D representations of mental illness where the only impact it has on their life and their world is to make them more endearing to the love interest
- consuming media with the above uncritically
- treating neuroatypicalities like they’re just quirky and funny and don’t deeply impact a person’s life in debilitating and othering way
- relating traits like fragile beauty, quiet dignity, etc to people with mental illness
- using people with mental illness as inspiration porn
- trying to be a savior and “fix” people or giving shallow advice- you are not a doctor
What it is not:
- talking about your mental illness
- coping with mental illness
- accepting and living with mental illness
- mental illness as a part of someone’s identity
- taking medication or going to therapy
- teenage girls writing posts about how depressed they are (calling this romanticizing mental illness without any more critical analysis reeks of misogyny)
- having multiple facets of neuroatypicality (example: being bipolar AND having depression)
- self harm
- suicidal ideation
- asking for help
*For the sake of clarity for those who may not know what neuroatypicality means, I am using the term mental illness interchangeably here though I recognize they are not necessarily the same word and that some people, myself included, have strong feelings about the term mental illness.
