"Opening an app now is like opening a door to a corridor lined with bear traps"

Headlines are horrifying. Screaming stories of murder. Suicide, school shootings, war and kidnappings. The facts are heavy, the statistics on suicide rising and rising, cases of children being diagnosed with mental disorders overflowing across hospitals. Yet we don’t even try to change our ways.

The mental health of teenagers is worsening, as the world we live in continues to function, continues to build, and build, trying to achieve greatness and success. Yet it remains a fact that 10,200 deaths each year are the direct result of an eating disorder. And that over 200 teenagers in England take their own lives each year, yet this number does not even account for those who attempt, or the teenagers whose limp bodies will be adorned with marks of self-harm.

Yet supposedly, teenagers are there for each other, to help to provide a safe and loving environment. But opening an app now is like opening a door to a corridor lined with bear traps. There are people online who romanticize mental disorders, who try and relate to a community of people who are suffering, yet in doing so enter the minds of those who are or aren’t and torture them. Posts of supposedly ‘relatable content’ of people not telling anyone that their struggling should not be available to young eyes, encouraging people to tape their mouths shut and keep their ‘problems’ inside their heads.

No mental illness should be romanticized or desired, posts of disordered eating, self-harm or panic attacks should not be allowed on the screens of young people, for the intention of finding a community, someone to relate to. As these posts could appear on the screen of a ten-year-old child, who will immediately be swallowed into a rabbit-hole, of mental illness being portrayed online as something that can’t be helped or should be seen as something to be desired, something people want to have.

And so I ask that next time you plan on saying something that could hurt someone, that you think twice about the words that so openly flow out of your mouth that could so easily drown the person you’re talking to.

I simply ask that you at least try and change the way you look at things, the way you view people and certain stereotypes. I ask that you are willing enough to allow the reality of our world’s toxicity to enter your mind and show you the darkest truth of ugliness of our society. Change. Something that could transform the lives of millions, but are you willing to try to help our dying society ?