Mental health and physical health can be likened to one another in a myriad of ways, but ultimately although they are somewhat similar, there's one clear difference: with the majority of physical health concerns, there are a number of tests that can give you an answer as to what's going on. You go to the doctors with a problem, and you expect them to (eventually) be able to say, okay, you have X illness, and here's what we can do. I'm not saying this happens with all physical health conditions, or that things always get diagnosed correctly at first all the time. For mental health issues however, there are no blood tests or urine samples or anything that can really tell you if you have a problem.
I first heard about this app in a tweet, and naturally assumed it was too good to be a real thing, a hoax that got RTed a few too many times. But, having downloaded it myself and checked it out, the Calm Harm app is real, and it's incredible. It's a free app designed to help people that self harm. Although I don't feel that urge very often at all any more, I wish I had this in the first year of my recovery.
I LOVE writing about mental health. I love challenging people's stereotypes about MH sufferers, I love spreading awareness and I love tackling taboos. It's something I bring everywhere I go. I chat about it in the workplace, in my relationship, with my friends, on social media and of course on my blog.
BUT
I definitely feel inhibited in terms of chatting about it on my blog. For me, it's my most important platform (even more so than vocally talking about it to people), because it's there on the internet for everyone to see. It's not a conversation that happens and is forgotten, or a tweet that goes missing amidst a sea of thoughts and blog post promos. Instead, it's something that people can look for, and come back to when they need it.
I'm not saying that I think people use my blog as some kind of mental health bible, or that I don't feel comfortable sharing my story on the internet. I firmly believe that personal tales are key to reducing the stigma around mental health, which is why I spoke about my own struggle with self-harm. Instead, I'm saying that I feel an immense amount of pressure to say the right thing.
Usually I find writing blog posts fun and carefree. I love letting you guys know what kind of lipstick I'm loving at the moment, and I honestly do not feel guilty if someone bought it because of my post and hated it. It's rubbish, but it happens, and it's not my fault that we don't enjoy the same things.
With mental health posts it's different. I read and reread and consider every single word I say. I'm permanently conscious that every word is a potential trigger. My self harm story post was probably the hardest post for me to write for this blog. Not because it re-surfaced old traumas that I'd put behind me, but because I was trapped between not wanting to say too little or too much.
I didn't want to talk in-depth about how awful I found recovery at first; I didn't want to put anyone off attempting it. Equally, however, I didn't want to pretend it was easy; I didn't want anyone trying to recover to think that they were strange or isolated for struggling with recovery. It's exactly this trying to create a balance that makes things hard when writing mental health posts. I want to be honest, but I don't want to trigger people. I want to talk about things in depth, but I don't want to encourage people to do the things I have. I worry that I'm being selfish by not helping others by creating MH posts, and worry that I'm being selfish by using my blog as a space for my own catharsis, when it could trigger other people.
There's so many things I would want to talk about, but know that I would have to spend hours finding the right words, or even deciding whether it's a safe topic to talk about. I want to spread awareness about helping others who are suffering from self-harm. I want to write about how to potentially spot whether someone may be doing it, so that someone could be stopped from taking it one step too far, but I equally know that I would have HATED this when I was struggling; I would have been angry, mortified, and it would have triggered me to be worse.
I'd love to talk about other mental health concerns. I've had some incredibly close friends that have suffered with eating disorders. I'd love to work to reduce the stigma against these types of mental health issues, but I feel like I can't because I haven't suffered from them myself.
All in all, I'd like to do more, but this concept of responsibility plays on my mind all the time. I want to make things better, not worse and I feel as though it's often a very fine line to tread.
Would you like to see more open or explicit MH posts? Do you blog about MH too? What are your thoughts on the whole notion of responsibility?
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I love the internet, and I love social media even more. But let's face it, there are some really dark corners of the 'net out there. Social media for me now is a place to share things I love; quick snaps of yummy things I've baked on Instagram, blog posts I've poured my heart into on Facebook, and snippets of what's making me feel good on Twitter. However, it wasn't always like that. Twitter used to be a place for me to vent, a place I'd go to and angrily scrawl song lyrics into a tweet. And the only other platform I really used was tumblr.
Before I really got into the platform, I was warned against it by some of my closest friends. All three of us suffered with self harm and depression, and they told me that it'd be a mistake. I promised I wouldn't look into the 'dark side' of tumblr. I lied. It's a site where there's no real kind of monitoring. If I see someone tweeting #thinspo pictures, or Instagramming self harm, I can report them, or block them and it'll go away. But with tumblr? There's no real protection, especially if part of you doesn't want protecting.
I really wanted to go with a black and white 'theme'. I wanted to follow accounts that reblogged pictures with emotive quotes about mental health issues. I wanted to be in the 'community' of people on tumblr who suffered with self harm, in the hope of connecting with people that felt the way I did. Although in some respects I got what I wanted, I also got a whole lot that I didn't.
My dash(board) was now full of images and gifs that summed up the way I was feeling. But, interspersed with them were things I didn't need to see: thinspo accounts with seriously underweight girls calling themselves fat, words cut into people's skin to define what they hated about themselves, and more. This isn't what I came to tumblr for, but it's what I got wrapped up in.
It's almost a kind of competition over there. People regularly post pictures of their self-harm, which is always going to make you compare yours to theirs. I know that mine got a lot worse because of these images: clearly I wasn't doing enough damage to have a 'problem'. Then there's a whole corner of the site where you have people counting down their weight, and posting pictures of them getting thinner and thinner. It's a dangerous place to be. A really dangerous place to be. If there's one site that I wish could be banned, purely for the easy access it gives teens to images or texts posts like these, it would be tumblr.
And yes, obviously not everyone uses it for these purposes. For some it's a place to get politically inspired, for others it's a place to visit 'for the aesthetic'. But for a lot of people, it's a deep, dark and terrifying place.
What do you think of the site?
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