Forget the 150
people who died in a an apparent murder-suicide on board a Germanwings flight,
or the pain and turmoil being felt throughout the IS region; apparently the
most devastating news is that a young man has left a pop band. In response to
this users of a internet forum called 4chan began a twitter hashtag called ‘cut4Zayn’.
Part of my anger is directed at this. Self-harm is a serious symptom and whilst
I agree there are a lot of over-dramatic upset teenagers right now, this is not
the way to make light of them. I have self harmed and for me it was a good
coping mechanism. I made sure I never cut wide or deep and that I always sterilise
my blade with a flame. Many people who self harm do not do it as safely as I
did and many people escalate and spiral from it. It is worth pointing out that
Zayn is not dead – he’s just left a boyband. Did people react like this with
Ronan Keating or Robbie Williams or John Lennon?
 |
| Tweets featuring the hashtag and total retweets at 3pm on 26th March |
The hashtag trended worldwide reaching between 8 and 8.5 million twitter users and
millions more through the mainstream media who This means that people either found it funny
and retweeted it or, and this angers and worries me more, that people retweeted
because they felt so upset about this young man that they actually wanted to
cut themselves. At the time of writing this post (24hrs after the news broke)
the hashtag had been used 1,500 times by 615 users on Twitter alone but there
is one redeeming feature.
Once it became clear
that the majority of tweets were not actually encouraging self-harm, many
people used the hashtag to debate the topic of mental health openly slamming
the jokes being made and publically offering support to those who do self harm.
The UK mental health charity, Mind, said in a press statement: "Self-harm
is an incredibly serious problem and should never be trivialised. We urge those
using Twitter or other social media sites at this time not to engage with posts
that promote harmful behaviour, and to report any activity that causes them
concern.”
 |
| Self=harm isn't a joke SCARS STAY FOREVER |
If you feel the need to self-harm then I understand and
whilst we would all prefer it if you didn’t – I am not going to physically stop
you. All I ask is that you do it safely (clean equipment, have a first aid kit
ready etc) and that if it is becoming too much then it is time to talk. We all
have people we can reach out to whether it is the ‘big brother’ figure I try to
be at my local drama club or a mental health campaigner on Twitter; a charity
like Samaritans or Mind and for youngsters there is Childline. All of these
people are wanting to help and not to judge. There are better ways of coping - I promise you.
In my own personal mental health journey, I have not heard
back from the Bi-polar interview thing that happened around a month ago – you can
read about it in my blog. I have sent emails to different people and I guess I
am going to have to force myself to call them. Generally speaking I feel that
my mental health has been better since I have been on these meds. My normal
tickover was at zero on the happy scale but now is on 2-3 out of 5. Before I
would of described my manic silly moments as 5-6 out of 5 but I seem to be
hitting 5 more and more often. As long as I am not irritating anyone, I quite
like this. I have still had my wobbles but nothing as bad as you have seen in
this blog over the past 6 months. I guess a simple musical metaphor would be
that my emotional state has transposed up the scale.
Before I leave you this week, I would like to direct you to
my YouTube channel where we are trialing live broadcasts *gulps* and Off
The Radar will be live this Sunday night for a night of comedy and fun with Radar
Live: Watching Wrestlemania 2015. It will be… erm… interesting.
Feel free to tweet me with feedback and comments – do you
like our comedy podcast? Are you self-harming? What is BIDMAS? Or share your #mentalhealth journey.
CLICK here to go read my 2nd favourite blog : Lucy!
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