How Pop Culture, and Especially Internet Memes, Convinced Me I Needed Help and That I Should Write About It, too
I take anti-depressants.
Well, just 1 anti-depressant. 300 mg of Welbutrin every day.
It does not – and I can’t stress this enough – make me feel different in any discernable way except the occasional light headedness when I don’t drink enough water.
The only real thing I notice – and this is a “notice” stretched out over weeks and months, and is therefore, harder to notice – is that I don’t spiral like I once did.
Unless, like my girlfriend, you count this blog as one long spiral session I engage in week after week. But at least this is a productive, sometimes funny spiral. Most spirals are not that.
Before I was re-introduced to Welbutrin in my early 30s (I took it for a few months in high school to quit smoking) and before the world was re-introduced to the Jersey Shore cast via Jersey Shore Family Reunion, I did not know what spiraling was.
The Spiral Squad
For some background, Snooki and Ronnie are cast members on Jersey Shore and they call themselves the “Spiral Squad”.
They definitely live up to the name.
Now, as Ronnie and Snooki make clear in the clip below, their Spiral Squad has a lot to do with drinking oneself to the point of walking unconsciousness.
But in Ronnie’s case, it appears to also have a lot to do with his mental health.
Snookie: How are you and Jen [Ronnie’s Girlfriend whom he shares a tumultuous relationship with]?
Ronnie: [frantically shaking head] it’s good…it’s better than it was.
Snookie: Is it?
Ronnie will sometimes spend an entire day in bed, awake, on his cell phone, not participating with anyone else in the house: not starting fights with Angelina, not bromancing with Vinny and Pauly D, not even starting fights with JWoww. Just laying in bed, all day.
While luckily I’ve been able to avoid alcoholism (and by no short means because my parents warned me early and often that addiction is in our family) I can see parts of myself in Ronnie’s spiraling.
So I looked it up.
The thoughts that create “Spiraling” are also called “emotional amplifiers”.
In depression, exaggerated all-or-nothing thinking can form a self-reinforcing cycle: these thoughts might be called emotional amplifiers because, as they go around and around, they become more intense
Even wikipedia agrees with Ronnie and me that spiraling is, like, super uncool and definitely a thing.
A Brief Aside for A Troubling Conclusion and a Scientific Graph
Does this mean my mental health, all this time, hinged upon the success of a Jersey Shore reboot?
That my own well-being, for the last two decades, has lied completely in the hands of MTV Producers?
Producers who have created such hits as Teen Mom (where teenagers have kids), Ex on The Beach (where ex-girlfriends and boyfriends rise out of the water like swamp-things to live with their exes while those exes date new people in front of them), and How Far is Tattoo Far? (where people blindly let someone who is mad at them put a tattoo on them)?
Is that why my mental health has felt, at times, so precarious?
Coincidence or science? Let this graph help you decide:
The International Network & This Is Us
I would argue that the internet has increased empathy and understanding of mental health issues at a rate we haven’t experienced in modern history.
This current generation knows more about, feels less alone with, and expresses their mental health issues more directly than any previous western generation combined. Let me explain.
Other person: that’s…not what it stands for
Now I can’t say with certainty that there wasn’t some type of communal empathy in Victorian England or Revolution-era America for what they might have called the “town moron” (“moron” being the term for adults with the mental age of 8-12 year olds, up until the 20th century) and these are only western cultural examples, but I have a feeling that while there were people who displayed profound mental illness and disabilities, and therefore were treated differently (for worse but possibly sometimes with understanding) most people suffered silently for generations, to the point where pain and suffering became so intertwined with existence that the following phrases became popular sayings:
- “that’s life”
- “life is pain”
- “get over it”
- “pull yourself together”
- “get a grip”
- “snap out of it”
- “buck up”
- “suck it up”
- “man up”
It’s not that previous generations didn’t have anxiety or depression, it’s just that they called them, “life“.
That’s life, that’s what all the people say Flying high in April, shot down in May – Sinatra
Scholarly dissertations could be written about this, but for a quick pop culture reference, a recent episode of This Is Us (S04, E05) deals with anxiety, specifically, panic attacks.
In this episode, William (father of Bethany) admits when he was growing up (mid-20th century) they “didn’t have a word for it” so his mom would help him deal with his panic attacks by pouring sparkling water into a cup in front of him, comparing his brain with the fizzing bubbles, and telling him to watch the bubbles settle. Now, Willaim probably needed Xanax but again, they didn’t even have a word for “panic attacks” so I say, well done fictional mother of William.
70 years ago (sorry to age you fictional William) they didn’t have a word for panic attacks.
At least, according to This Is Us.
Well, not just This Is Us.
The DSM didn’t define panic disorder until 1980 with the publication of the DSM-III.
Research in this area continued along separate medical and psychological axes until 1980, when the development of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)-III criteria established the overall concept of panic disorder.
(Side note: America is super panic-attacky because we don’t have healthcare and all our social safety nets are being defunded.)
In Europe about 3% of the population has a panic attack in a given year while in the United States they affect about 11%
That was 1980.
In 2019, the #1 Network TV drama in America not only takes an episode to address panic attacks, within that episode they pass down a story about how panic attacks were addressed, or not addressed, in previous, recent generations. It is a cultural tale that reflects a culture’s understanding of itself and history, and one that appears to line up with the psychological understanding of panic attacks and disorders.
To say we’ve come along way is an understatement. It’s arguable that, when it comes to understanding and the sharing of experiences with mental illness, we’ve come further in a shorter amount of time than any generation before.
And this is in large part due to memes.
Memes and Mental Health
I think there are story tellers, and then I suspect there are people who tell stories mainly as a vehicle to explore truths about the human condition, waiting for a precise moment to drop a small, dense, truth in context.
To the latter point, my favorite clips of dialogue from television shows and movies are the moments where someone says the thing that both:
- completely sums up where this specific story has taken them
- and simultaneously rings true if it was taken completely out of context
GRRM does this amazingly well when it comes to writing about Power. The quotes below are just a few examples that speak to how humans use power on a macro level, and yet, in context, are sentences that makes perfect sense for <insert GoT character of choice> to say within the conversation he/she’s having.
“When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.” — Cersei
“Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder.” — Littlefinger
“Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick; a shadow on the wall.” — Varys
“Any man who must say ‘I am the King’ is no true King.” — Tywin
The most underrated ability we have today compared to previous generations is the ability to share our truth more affordably and more instantaneously than ever before.
The internet is all small truths: anyone, anywhere, at any time can share a small truth and it can be collectively agreed upon and shared.
No film sets, no directors, no publishing houses, no news editors, no microphones, no business connections needed: just one person putting a few words to an image or just typing a quick, random story.
It is because of memes like these that I feel comfortable enough to share my use of Welbutrin.
It is because of Jersey Shore Family Reunion calling out Spiraling, and Summer House giving a name to the anxiety that creeps up in the late afternoon of a Sunday (“The Sunday Scarries”) that I feel, honestly this sounds ridiculous but, acknowledged in my own existential pain.
Granted those are reality TV examples, but what other pop culture references are more a representative of our times (for better or for worse, but definitely for worse) than memes and reality television?
Despite the prescience of Bravo and r/2meirl4meirl there is one final bit of pop culture that pushed me over the edge into accepting that I could use some help.
The Bupropion Tipping Point
Pop Culture has not had a great record with talking about medications.
The usual commentary is the faux-edgy stance that pills are like, desensitizing us man, and we’re all like, total zombies on them who don’t, you know, like, feel things.
That’s why memes, and even Jersey Shore or Summer House, can feel more important than they should have a right to: they’re discussing mental health issues without judgment.
And while those pop culture productions do an unexpectedly ok job of addressing these struggles, the piece of pop culture that did the best job of explaining what it’s like to try to get chemical help for these struggles was, for me, Chris Gethard’s Career Suicide, a one-man stand up show all about his struggles with manic episodes and suicidal ideations.
My mental health issues have never been nearly as intense as Chris’, but his reasoning to seek help is something everyone can sympathize with: life doesn’t need to be this hard.
It is not meaningful pain, it is simply suffering and there is something you can do about it.
For most of my life I didn’t understand Spiraling because I thought that my thoughts were just how life was for everyone; one negative thought leading to another, all the while, my brain trying to justify and understand these painful thoughts through the normal filter of experience: if I’m feeling bad there must be a reasonable explanation.
But there was no Reason behind my pain, at least not the kind of reasons one usually associates with pain: external things like knives, or jokes your friends say that you pretend aren’t true about yourself but you know they just cut you to the bone so you just keep laughing along with everyone until someone changes the subject.
When you try to understand your suffering, but the thing doing the understanding is suffering itself, the logic becomes warped.
You begin to think you must deserve the pain.
That if you were better, or better at something, you wouldn’t feel the way you do. But since you didn’t speak up that one time, or didn’t say the right thing that other time, or are nervous to talk to someone you don’t know that well, you definitely deserve to feel terrible a lot of the time. Oh, and all that “feeling terrible” you’re experiencing now will definitely make other life achievements harder and you will hold that against yourself in the future.
Where Chris Gethard’s Career Suicide was the pop culture push I needed to talk to my doctor about anti-depressants, Gary Gulman’s new special The Great Despresh is the pop culture push I needed to share the fact that I take anti-depressants.
It’s a brilliant, thoughtful hour of Gulman’s struggles with depression and growing up a self-admittedly “soft” male in America.
Now, no one should need to rely on reality TV stars making poor life decisions to seek help and people should definitely not look to stand-up comedians for mental health guidance, but whatever gets you there, gets you there.
All I know is I’ve learned that the only Spiral Squad I’m rolling with from here on out is me and my doctor who prescribes me mild anti-depressants.
That’s a super corny ending but is undeniably airtight writing.
I’m keeping it because, well…I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.
