It won't be wrong to say that this 15-year-old kid was misrepresenting while telling his friend that he had had childhood traumas on the pretext that his mum wasn’t allowing him to go to a gaming zone with his friends, and he couldn't order his favourite pizza on a weekday to swap for a boring homemade meal.
Is the word ‘trauma’ being taken too casually by the youngsters today for trivial dislikes in day-to-day life? Or is a simple no from the guardians for their safety, that they overlook, counted as a reason to land them in pseudo depression and other behavioural issues? Without a speck of doubt, mental health awareness has transformed the trajectory of mental illnesses and disorders that were once easily brushed under the carpet. Vigilance has saved quietly suffering children, minors, and individuals to come up and speak about their issues before they are dismissed or unheard.
That’s huge progress in comprehending the unsaid mental pain of one and creating platforms and institutions for its proper addressal, diagnosis, and providing much-needed management and treatment options. However, in propagating this long-overdue awareness, unintentional offshoots have arisen of discriminating against a real issue from a ‘self-imposed’ one.
The question is: what is the benchmark to distinguish between actual mental illnesses and diseases that people suffer from the usual everyday life’s offs and ons? Are common emotions like sadness, hesitation, anguish, grief, and stress labelled as disorders? Have we become too vocal to paint every diminutive emotional state as a mental pathological state? The therapy lingo: boundaries, safe space, self-care, dysregulation, coping, etc., is picked up by everyone and passed on to everyday human experiences as a retreat.
If we speculate on the possible reasons, one of them might be the overuse of social media, where we are fed everywhere that people around us are toxic, narcissistic, triggers, provokers, and so on. When someone says something for our benefit, if it's not pleasing, it is taken as a threat to mental health, and the former is tagged as ‘offensive’ for their statement and behaviour.
Moreover, people are losing their calm and patience with the prevalence of Artificial Intelligence in all domains. Once the tasks that took time, effort, and brainstorming are replaced by a prompt. The outcome is declining resilience and uncontrolled outbursts of emotions.
Secondly, there exists branding of mental health in the form of self-care rituals, bedtime routines, parenting styles, or relationship goals, glorified by fake influencers and the push to sell wellness products, where normal errands have been turned into a mental wellness project. The stuff that was simple and minimal in the past has been overcomplicated now, and sadly, everyone wants to win this race without identifying the real suffering from a bad experience.
Moreover, this tremendous exposure has led to self-diagnosis and to becoming over-conscious of oneself and one’s environment around one’s symptoms. People correlate the societal definitions of trauma, victimisation, and pain with their own life events and eventually self-diagnose as emotionally and mentally broken.
Applying cause-and-effect theory, curbing this unwanted offshoot isn’t that impossible. If we limit such conversations, restrict access, and work with trusted professionals to find solutions, that will help prevent these repercussions. Portraying any uneasy experience as a mental health threat should not be discussed or subjected to social media debates, validation, and fame.
Stringent policies and strict action for those who manipulate the terms to benefit and ease themselves must be put into practice so that the real mental health sufferers are not dismissed yet again and are promptly given a way to a fruitful outcome.
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