One of my favorite musicals as of late is Next to Normal. The show follows suburban mother Diana Goodman, her struggle with bipolar disorder and chronic grief, and how that struggle impacts her family. The show’s depiction of her struggle is very real and intense, refusing easy consolations or fixes for her mental afflictions. She takes all of the usual measures those struggling with mental illness do, and finds them not to work. For example, she takes an enormous amount of medications, only for them to numb her and make her lose herself completely. She goes through therapy, and only finds herself going in circles. Moreover, the show does not end with Diana fully overcoming her illness, but rather learning to live with it. The show is thus profoundly “unromantic” in its depiction of mental illness. At no point is bipolar disorder viewed as a “gift”, as something necessary so Diana can be a stronger person, or as something Diana can turn into something beautiful. It is viewed as a difficult thing she has to live with; nothing more. While I hesitate to call Next to Normal the “gold standard” for representation of mental health problems (it may be a little too dark for that), it’s pretty close to it, as it avoids the major pitfall that culture tends to fall into regarding mental illness: romanticization.

To romanticize something is to represent it in a more idealized and positive fashion. This is distinct from simply recognizing that something “isn’t all that bad”, which is nuanced, lucid reasoning. To romanticize something is to effectively transform it so that you are no longer looking at what it actually is, but at a more beautiful, sensational version of it. Granted, there are times when the romantic image of something and the thing’s reality do match up, times we humans treasure the most. However, we must always be wary of making something beautiful or desirable that which is not.

This article serves as a brief survey of three prominent strands of problematic romanticization of mental illness in culture, as well as an introduction to The Megaphone’s Mental Health Awareness series in general. Following this article, more pieces will be published in hopes to explore the challenges of living with various mental health conditions, the (often poor) representation of those conditions in media, and the (often problematic) ways society views those conditions as a result. There will also be pieces exploring whether certain societally-endorsed approaches to living with mental illness actually work. But for now, with this article, I will outline three examples of what I see as problematic romanticization of mental illness in culture.

For one, there is the omnipresent idea that pain is necessary for beautiful art, also known as the “suffering artist” trope. Bob Dylan expresses this in his famous line, “Behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain.” A more modern example is the film, Whiplash. The film follows 19-year old drummer Andrew Neiman, who is incredibly ambitious. He desires to be a virtuosic jazz drummer, and enrolls at a top jazz conservatory in New York to achieve his dream. While there, he joins the conservatory band and is mentored by the conductor, Terence Fletcher. Fletcher is incredibly cutthroat, stopping at nothing to extract greatness from his students, from various forms of abuse to psychological warfare. He puts Neiman through the wringer throughout the whole movie, culminating in a glorious drum performance from the latter at the end. While Neiman is not explicitly diagnosed with any condition in the film, he clearly experiences mental affliction and trauma. His obsession with becoming “one of the greats”, once spurned by Fletcher’s cruelty, overtakes his life completely, leading him to break up with his girlfriend, devote excessive (sometimes late-night) hours to practicing, and practice so hard that it makes his hands bleed.

Now, there are different ways of interpreting Whiplash. But for me, it’s hard not to come away from the film and think that the movie doesn’t romanticize mental illness, in this case, trauma. While the film does have an example of Fletcher’s methods leading to a tragic outcome for one of his students—the student takes his own life—that example is treated as a potential risk of Fletcher’s methods which is outweighed by the great artists they produce. The movie doesn’t have anything which explicitly condemns the suffering artist narrative, and instead just presents us with another version of it. All the mental turmoil Andrew endures was necessary for him to achieve greatness; by the end of the movie, as he finishes his climactic drum solo, he is happy that all the suffering brought him to such a glorious moment.

The “suffering artist” narrative is not just highly mythological (the idea that Andrew’s obsessive and bloody practice methods would actually make him into a great drummer is very questionable) but very alienating for those who struggle to turn their painful experiences into beautiful, popular art… which is most people. For a lot of people, depression doesn’t make them more creative. If anything, it just leads to them being perpetually “stuck”, unable to really do much of anything.

Another example of problematic romanticization of mental illness in culture is the “Sad Girl Aesthetic”, which was prominent on Tumblr in the mid-2010’s, and has returned under a new form on TikTok. The aesthetic was born from young women being overly transparent about—and/or performative of—their sadness online, and has grown into a festering ground for mentally ill young women, complete with posts of Sylvia Plath quotes and clips of Winona Ryder from Girl Interrupted fetishizing her sadness. Unfortunately, the romanticization and exploitation of tragic women for artistic purposes is nothing new; Shakespeare arguably began the trend with characters like Juliet and Ophelia. Many poets followed in this trend, such as Baudelaire, who wrote a whole poem (“The Carcass”) about taking delight in the corpse of a beautiful woman, and Edgar Allen Poe, who once remarked, “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (sorry Poe fans). Nowadays, however, the male gaze is no longer needed to aestheticize the sadness of women; plenty of women are willing to do it themselves online. If you dress like Lana Del Rey and say The Bell Jar is your favorite book, you’re more than halfway there. (The Sad Girl Aesthetic: From Shakespeare to Tumblr – THE CAROLINIAN)

Beyond the sexism, there are other issues with the “Sad Girl Aesthetic” online. For one, it guarantees that people who need mental health support won’t seek it out. By going online and branding themselves as “sad girls”, they are telling the algorithms to give them more content of a romantically sad variety and, given the nature of social media, it effectively guarantees that these young women will stay stuck in their depression because they will constantly imbibe content which idealizes it. They will keep on thinking that wallowing in melancholy makes them “deep”, which only works to reinforce such behavior. To be clear, there is nothing wrong in connecting with a sad piece of media. But to constantly return to it, to take pleasure in the sadness, and to romanticize your despair by saying it makes you a deeper thinker, are dangerous pitfalls. I know because I have participated in similar behavior before. In my own struggles with anxiety, depression, and OCD (we love comorbidity!!) I have often gotten attached to very negative self-concepts and conceptions of the world, conceptions which I then took to be evidence of myself being a “deeper thinker”. While I wouldn’t advise getting attached to overly positive concepts either, it is more dangerous to make misery your friend. This brings me to a third and final example of romanticization of mental illness, one I—an enjoyer of (some) philosophy—have much personal experience with: philosophical pessimism.

Didn’t expect that one huh? Well, it’s more prevalent than you think. If you go to the nearest Barnes and Noble and peruse the philosophy section, you are likely to find books espousing some sort of pessimistic or even nihilistic outlook, from Emil Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born to Adam Kirsch’s The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us. The latter is particularly interesting to me. It is a work summarizing a growing tradition of thought which views existence as awful, the world as ending, and humans as responsible for the latter. Thus, the argument—for one strand of this tradition—is that we humans should celebrate our inevitable extinction, resign from political activism, and probably stop having kids too. The other strand aligns with Transhumanism, arguing that advanced technology will allow humanity to transcend itself to become something better. While the world is in a tumultuous place at the moment, it is disheartening to hear political theorists and other academics celebrate humanity’s end. Take world-renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. He is an incredibly pessimistic communist thinker whose “wisdom” on what to do to make societal conditions better is: “Do nothing.” He continues to peddle around the idea that humanity is doomed and that we should welcome the ways technology transforms humanity. He says all of this because to him, happiness is just the attitude late-stage capitalism wants you to adopt. In his words: “happiness is a conformist category.” 

To me, this philosophical movement seems to be nothing more than a grand romanticization of despair and it reinforces a false sense of intellectual heroism. If you’re feeling melancholy and nihilistic, academics like Kirsch and Žižek are here to say in response: “Yes! Life is suffering and we are doomed! Now you are thinking deeply and are truly comprehending ultimate reality, not to mention resisting capitalist ideology!” The despairing person thus begins to see themselves as a “true intellectual” or a “truly deep thinker” or even a “radical” as opposed to the “common rabble” who know nothing and go along with whatever the system tells them. It is an incredibly narcissistic outlook which once again, only serves to reinforce the cycle of despair. I myself fell dangerously close to this pessimistic way of looking at things, and it was awful. Misery became a friend to me, and an incredibly clingy one at that. I would write nihilistic aphorisms in my journal and constantly listen to the most depressing Bo Burnham songs and think I was “truly understanding the world”, when in reality, I was just ensuring I would stay depressed. 

This isn’t to say overly optimistic philosophy is better, but one can have hope without succumbing to some shallow optimism. I would argue further that hope is something different from optimism. Optimism (and pessimism) close off the future with confident statements about how things will turn out; hope keeps the future open. The fact that things are not set in stone means there is a chance things will get better, and that chance is the life-blood of hope. An optimist does not need hope; for them, there is no chance. For the optimist, everything will certainly turn out well. Hope thus requires a certain faith; a fidelity to life itself, despite how things turn out.

As I close out this prelude, hope seems an appropriate final subject, because that is the main emotion I want this series of articles to stir up in people. If you choose to keep following this series, you will see stories of people who have real, difficult struggles, but who find ways to keep going and resist the romanticization of melancholy. They find ways to have hope. Along the way, you will also learn about misconceptions surrounding mental illnesses and the difference between good and bad representation in media, the latter of which this prelude has already partially answered. If you are struggling with mental illness yourself, I hope these articles will comfort you with the fact that you do not struggle alone, and I hope they inspire you to carry on. As philosopher Albert Camus said, “Sometimes carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.”