Host Anna Borges (The More Or Less Definitive Guide to Self-Care), who was famously dragged on Twitter after making a few jokes in reference to mental health, revisits mental health meme culture and how it can be a useful tool to find community during dark times. She’s joined by Memes To Discuss In Therapy admin Priscilla Eva for a discussion on “shitposting,” finding the humor in our collective struggles and how social media can actually breed compassion for ourselves and for others. 

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Full Transcript

Anna Borges: They say that everyone remembers their first time—I know that I do. Slowly waking up in the morning. Bright light streaming in through the window…

…the sound of my phone rattling on the nightstand as a stream of notifications flooded in.

MUSIC PAUSE, PHONE VIBRATION SOUND EFFECT

Sorry, did you think I was talking about something else? Yeah, no, I’m talking about the first time I got absolutely dragged on the internet.

MUSIC

It was early 2016 and I was a writer at BuzzFeed. I’d been tasked with the challenge of finding a way to make mental health content shareable, and relatable, and viral. And that might sound like a ridiculously easy job in the year of our digital lord 2022, but it wasn’t that long ago that the landscape of mental health content looked very different than it does today. Like on big mainstream websites, it was pretty much limited to serious and earnest personal essays and serious and earnest resource articles. And everything else was kind of like… you know… niche. Like it existed, but just in certain corners of the internet.

So, I decided to try doing what I’d long done in my little corners of the internet, I joked about my depression.

And it did not go well.

RECORD SCRATCH, CROWD GASP, YOUNG GIRL SHOUTING “YOU NEED TO LEAVE”

The roundup in question was “21 Tweets About Depression That Might Just Make You Laugh.” A quintessential BuzzFeed list that I thought would make people laugh, and, you know, more importantly, maybe make them feel less alone.

And [laughs] man oh man, was I wrong. Instead, the comments and the emails and the tweets just came flooding in.

SOUNDS OF CROWD JEERING

Anonymous Commenter: “I feel physically sick after reading this. This post is horrible.”

Anonymous Commenter: “You clearly have no experience with depression if you think these are funny.”

Anna Borges: And, and I can’t emphasize how mild these tweets were. You know, it was stuff like, “It’s not called a nap, it’s called a depression sleep.” And like, “I can’t wait for my winter depression to end so I can get a start on my spring depression!” Just completely innocuous tweets that you would probably see seventeen of a day these days. And the comments just kept coming.

Anonymous Commenter: “This is disrespectful to people who actually struggle.”

Anonymous Commenter: “You have no business writing about mental health.”

Anonymous Commenter: “Depression isn’t funny. Period. It never will be!”

Anna Borges: And I couldn’t help but immediately panic and wonder if I’d made, like, some grave mistake. I was like, “Are they right? Was my chosen coping mechanism disrespectful and out of touch? Should I have kept it a shameful secret? What is wrong with me!?”

Was joking about my mental health really so wrong?

MOOD RING THEME MUSIC

I’m Anna Borges and this is Mood Ring, a practical guide to feelings…even when some people think your jokes about those feelings are pretty fucked up.

Every episode, we’re exploring one new way to cope — with our feelings, with our baggage, with our brain, with the internet or with the world around us.

Anna Borges: Today’s episode is about laughing about mental health. Our mental health. Specifically, laughing about our mental health by following accounts we find relatable and making it part of our regular social media diet.

Now to be clear, disclaimer up top, it’s totally okay if jokes about mental health don’t feel particularly funny to you. What makes us laugh is, you know, an extremely personal thing, especially where mental health is concerned. And far be it for me to try and tell people that they should find my tweets about wanting to die hilarious. It’s not for everyone.

All that said, I’m really relieved that joking about mental health on social media is way more accepted than it used to be. Because now, all of my feeds are full of reminders that I’m not alone, and they offer new ways to frame how I think about my struggles. And, I mean yeah,  they make me laugh and laughing is great.

So let’s dig into why following mental health accounts is, you know, a small way to show yourself some love. Joining me is Priscilla Eva, who runs one of my favorite mental health accounts, Memes to Discuss in Therapy. And when I say memes to discuss in therapy, I don’t mean wholesome memes that would make my therapist proud. I mean memes that would make my therapist like start scribbling a lot of notes.

And by that, I mean total shitposts.

You’re good if you’re not actually familiar with this whole mental health shitposting thing—the main thing you need to know is that they’re the kind of posts that probably seem inappropriate or insensitive or dark from the outside. But when you are in on the joke? It’s kind of like finding shorthand for the experiences that you thought no one else understood.

So let’s dive into my conversation with Priscilla.

MUSIC FADE OUT

Anna Borges: I would love to start by hearing from you, just for people who aren't familiar with the page how you would describe it, just to like anchor, anchor our listeners into like, what the f we're talking about.

Priscilla Eva: It's just a meme shitposting page. And I like to say I specialize in curating and making memes for mental health and chronic illness. Because those are the two things I care about, mental health and chronic illness related things. And, those are the things that I find most resonant and like to share and repost or make memes of.

Anna Borges: So can you give me kind of the origin story of how you started this page, and like what led to it?

Priscilla Eva: So my friend Tyler, they actually started the page about five years ago. And they started it for the same reason, wanted to just basically shit post mental health stuff. [Anna laughs] And it started as a Facebook page that was just, you know, sharing with a few friends. And then they made it public. And so I started helping, about four or five years ago?

Anna Borges: Oh, wow, I didn't realize the page had been alive for so long. I, I feel like a newcomer, like I'm a poser. I'm like, Oh, I've been a long term fan of memes to discuss in therapy. And it's like, oh, no, no,

Priscilla Eva: Our growth only really, I think took off … a little bit before the pandemic started. [Anna: hmmmm] And I think the pandemic did a lot for people, you know, realizing that they maybe had mental health stuff that they wanted to address for just a plethora of reasons.

Anna Borges: It’s, it became more mainstream.

Priscilla Eva: Yes. And so then we got even more followers from that. And then, we started the Instagram, so we could cross post. And, that's kind of where we grew to where we are today.

Anna Borges: So before that, what was your relationship with social media like, or was that really when you dove full in?

Priscilla Eva: Actually always had, you know, sort of flirtation ship with social media. I've had my SlyFox persona since high school, which was back in the MySpace days.

Anna Borges: Same, same. I was a scene queen, you know, just being sad on the internet since 2004.

Priscilla Eva: Yeah, so I've had my SlyFox persona since then. And I kind of use it as my, like, online posting alter ego.

Anna Borges: I feel often similarly when I talk about my mental health online. It's like there's how I talk about my mental health with my therapist and my friends, and then how I talk about it with it online and that difference there, but, it's not, so it sounds like you're someone who has always been comfortable on the internet in some way. Like an Internet person.

Priscilla Eva: Yeah, I, oh gosh. I was very into AIM back in the day, the instant messenger. Yes, and MySpace, all that. Had a lot of online friendships. So it's like people I act