Dear millennials : Is mental illness your alibi?

Even red flags look like flags through rose-coloured glasses. Such is the case with people who believe that mental illnesses are just terms they can spew around without a shadow of guilt. Our society doesn’t condemn it, it glorifies it.
In a tier of social hierarchy, exclusivity is a myth and everybody is similar in the notion that they want to be different. These social elements penetrate all levels of society. This happens in a manner that people who deal with actual issues send out vibes of gratification and popularity by identifying with popular people who are accustomed with mental illnesses in a way that ‘beauty stems out of tragedy’.
Existential crisis, identity crisis are terms everyone wants to identify with, without realising that these terms are associated with depression. Glorification of suicide on social media knows no bounds. Obsessive-Compulsive disorder isn’t just about wanting to be organised like Cooper Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory or wanting to have colour co-ordinations or about having perfect symmetry as an excuse to flaunt exuberance.
Working towards the unified goal of wanting to help people and de-stigmatise psychological disorders has gone haywire in a manner that perpetuating it or being a part of the cult is mandatory.
Most people identify with some disorder or the other to draw out sympathy for themselves or to be a part of a humongous delusion that romanticising abnormal behaviour is legitimate.
Skipping meals or consuming laxatives occassionally isn’t anorexia or bulimia. Cross-dressing for Halloween isn’t transvestic fetishism neither is occasional self-love, narcissism.
This endless ocean of worthlessness delves its tributaries onto the social networks of the Internet. People meant to find comfort online, find validation that they’re superior to normal people; that self-mutilation is beautiful and not dreadful. A post on Tumblr described suicide in a way that “suicidal people are angels that want to go home”.
Such statements become a constant, painful cycle of reinforcement that stems out of anonymous posters then stick together to form group therapy sessions without a therapist. Just noise, no action.
On the other hand, the older generation has been hammered from time immemorial that mental disorders are only an illusion and it shouldn’t take much time to snap out of it. They will smack the hell out of their children as a solution to curing them. Even though this nightmarish approach doesn’t seem plausible to many, the struggle is real.
Psychological disorders shouldn’t be a taboo anymore, agreed, but neither should they be gratified to the extent of normalising them.
Psychological disorders are battles that people with real problems fight rigourously everyday.
Anxiety and depression are exactly what they are described as: illnesses. You aren’t depressed if you’re sad for a miniscule amount of time. You aren’t suffering from anxiety if you get hyper before your exams or results. It’s high time we break this glass ceiling that keeps our castles from shattering with nothing more to our personalities than a glorified mental disorder. Stop using mental ilnesses as an excuse to stand out in a crowd.