I thought true activism and intersectionality were both supposed to include mental health and mental illnesses. I thought we were all fighting to remove the taboo from mental illnesses. I thought we were all about encouraging people to speak up in terms of mental health and I thought we were about standing behind those who are brave enough to seek help. But I was wrong. This past week has done nothing but show me how absolutely wrong I was about the activism that lies behind mental health reform. It’s infiltrated with stigma. It is still misunderstood.
Let’s start with Kehlani. She made waves on social media and created headlines after a picture of her lying in bed with rapper PARTYNEXTDOOR was posted. The rumor mill sprung straight into action and she was accused of cheating on her ex-boyfriend Kyrie Irving. Obviously, just like every other woman in the spotlight, she’d already had misogynistic slurs hurled at her on any given day for whatever reason prior to the photo. Women in the entertainment industry take hit after hit for minuscule things like what they wear, how they look and how they choose to appeal to their fans. It sickens me to imagine how much that hate must’ve multiplied after the picture surfaced and the adultery assumptions were made. After a brief explanation to her fans, she deleted her Instagram and was admitted to the hospital for contemplating suicide. Hauntingly enough, the hate quadrupled even more after the announcement was made. Everyone decided to weigh in their opinion, to try to judge a private situation for themselves. While the hashtag Stay Strong Kehlani trended with good intentions, prayers, and hope for the singer, another side of Twitter decided to drag her down even further. Speculations were made. People declared that she was just seeking attention. That if she was really contemplating suicide she wouldn’t have posted it on social media. Most disgusting of all, that if she really meant it, then she’d be dead already. Even celebrities with mass amounts of followers (I’m looking at you Chris Brown) tweeted similar lines of doubt and uncertainty, worsening an age old problem instead of aiming to mend it. The situation with Kehlani proved to us that suicide is still not taken seriously by the general population and that the stigma/myths surrounding it are still an accepted truth.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not Justin’s biggest fan. He’s made a lot of problematic mistakes and I’m very indifferent towards him. However, personal opinions aside, the reaction he got after announcing that he would be cancelling the Purpose Tour VIP experience showed that mental health, and the overall well-being of those who struggle with depression is something still majorly misunderstood; even by those who claim to know better. Fans were (rightfully) upset after learning that they would only get to take pictures with Justin’s backup dancers and a cardboard cut-out of the Biebs. They were later told that they could either get a partial refund and still keep the concert ticket or a full refund without the concert ticket. That left the price for the actual concert ticket somewhere around a thousand (yikes!!) dollars. The business aspect of this whole ordeal is undeniably messy. People didn’t get what they paid for and lost a lot of money over it. I would, however, argue that you can’t really put a price on someone’s mental health. Justin explained that even though he loved his fans, trying to meet the overwhelming expectations of so many left him feeling exhausted and not good enough; there were too many different things that he needed to be for different people and he just couldn’t handle the pressure. When put into perspective, it’s totally understandable on his behalf. Trying to meet each individual standard of hundreds of people a day would be hard enough on someone who doesn’t have a history of depression, let alone on someone who has openly dealt with it in the public eye. But any information that comes out of the fandom side of Twitter always trickles down into the feeds of those with personal accounts. Bieber was instantly under attack for the turn of events. People were quick to throw out ignorant statements about how he was spoiled, ungrateful, just in it for the money, only cared about himself, etc… Which is ultimately the worst thing you can do to someone who suffers from depression because it only worsens the feelings of guilt and worthlessness. This proved that the general public still doesn’t understand that depression is not something that can be cured with fame, money, or the love of adoring fans. The reality is that anyone can suffer from mild to severe depression, no matter who they are or where they come from. In fact, everyone will experience a case of depression at least one time in their adult lives. It is unreal to me that a common phenomenon that will be felt by everyone at least once is still so misunderstood and shamed.
Finally, (and wrapping up the week with a dramatic twist) is Halsey. The electropop singer deactivated her Twitter on Saturday after she responded to some tweets concerning both her and Kehlani’s mental state. The tweet questioned why Kehlani was shamed and hated on for her suicide contemplation but Halsey was not after she talked about a past attempt. First of all, the two situations shouldn’t have been compared in the first place as both were completely isolated incidents. Secondly, anyone who has followed Halsey or just anyone who is extremely active on Twitter knows that this isn’t true. Halsey gets a lot of hate day to day. She is bipolar and has discussed it quite frequently. Instead of appreciating the representation that she brings to those living with the disorder and acknowledging her success despite it, people immediately assume that she’s lying or making it up to be “relatable.” When she announced that she may not be able to have kids in an interview, the replies were disgusting and quite hateful. People rejoiced in the fact that she might not be able to reproduce and laughed at her despite the obvious pain that it brought her. When she talked about her suicide attempt, users told her that she should have tried harder, that she should’ve gone all the way through with it because they don’t want her to be alive. They choose to glide right over the fact that she is biracial and completely dismiss that she has a black father out spite. With all of this hate constantly thrown at her, it’s actually surprising that she didn’t deactivate sooner for her own safety and well-being. The situation with Halsey is a strange one. Her willingness to share information about her bipolar disorder is mocked, her advocacy is overlooked yet we have activists and general users alike crying out to remove the stigma from mental illnesses.
A last interesting point I’d like to make is that all three of these artists have a wide range of deep and brooding lyrics. All of them have sad songs about life struggles and complications. And as a society of music lovers, we enjoy them. We tweet their darker lyrics and caption our selfies with them because we feel a personal connection to them. We all use music to cope and to feel and to understand ourselves better. We accept our own sadness and our own bouts of depression but we rarely seem to accept it when others are going through it. Why is it ok for us to use their struggles to validate our own but then turn around and invalidate theirs when they become vocal about it? Why do we only care about it when it is in art form but ignore it when it is eating up another person from the inside out?
We clearly still have a long way to go and a lot of thigs to talk about in regards to mental health reform and awareness in the feminist/activist community and in our society as a whole. We need to stop perpetuating the myths out of hate or ignorance. We need to stop dismissing the honest struggles of people just because we don’t like a few other aspects of them. There are genuinely good voices that we can use to start revolutionizing the way our society views mental health but we are actively ignoring them or making a joke out of them. It only takes one interview, one article, one video, one song to change someone’s mind and to educate them on this. We have all the tools we need; we just need to allow ourselves to put them to use.
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