To pretend to be a bad vocalist, one has to be the opposite first.

You cannot purposefully exaggerate an off-key tune unless you know which notes to butcher in the first place. On television, when a character decreed an awful musician proceeds to belt out unpleasant sounds to an echoing laugh track, the actor at hand is often a very skilled performer. Examples of such include Trina Vega of Victorious or Sugar Motta of Glee. The science behind faking failure in performance is a heavily studied one, reaching all arenas of the fine arts. Deciding when you have reached the level of professionalism required to engage in falsifying failure is a feat that requires an analytical and self-critical skillset which can only be fostered through detailed knowledge of your own capabilities. One must know themselves deeply, intimately, and be extremely familiar with one’s own mental and physical limits, in addition to learning capability. Like any talent, failure is something that can be learned as long as one understands the risks they are undertaking. Deliberately ignoring proven methods and instructions for success in order to achieve an often comedic bit, can be damaging. This phenomenon remains not constrained to the arts. Sadness, too, can be mastered to instigate self-administered failure.

Sometimes, I wonder if I should teach a class on being sad. I have perfected the methods by which I am beautifully melancholy, even in the safe, lonely comforts of my own bedroom. How can my sadness be commodified? I ask myself, while struggling not to tear my hair from my scalp during an unglamorous crying episode. A commercialised view of one’s own depression has grown exponentially common over the years as mental torment has become increasingly personified. It is a celebrity in its own right – with a cult following that doubles over to ruin themselves in order to gain its favour. Mental torment has become a measurement tool for one’s maturity. The less anguish that somebody has experienced, the more hordes will band together to say that this person is naive, less understanding of the cruelty of the world, or even less intelligent. There is an undeniable beauty advertised in a pretty girl crying, curled into herself on her pastel-coloured covers like a wounded deer. She is appetizing, and easily adaptable in the modern media. As vulnerability and transparency about mental health continue to be sought after in pop culture, it is predictable that we as consumers will want to mimic the traits presented to us in characters which we admire. From this sentiment comes the birth of media which romanticise mental illness. Here, inaccurate portrayals of mental illness leads quickly into a demonization and rampant spreading of misinformation, making said illnesses appear much more desirable than they truly are. And finally, the culmination of misinformation of symptoms and unfounded, unresearched portrayals of mental illness has inevitably resulted in large masses of consumers incorrectly giving themselves labels of ailments they do not truly have.

Self-diagnosis refers to the act of attributing a medical diagnosis to oneself without written confirmation from a medical professional, whether physical or mental, self-diagnosis exists in all corners of medicine. Generally, self-diagnosis is an act that is shunned and frowned upon, though I am of the firm belief that the large majorities of those who push forward this narrative surrounding self-diagnosis are too far overlapping self-diagnosis with the act of faking illness altogether. As well, the vilification of self-diagnosis is a heavily privileged one, ignoring the high levels of inaccessibility for medical diagnosis which is rampant especially for women, plus-size people, people of colour, and the LGBTQ+. The discussion surrounding self-diagnosis has always been one of extreme generalisation with more concern for shaming those who partake in the act rather than reflecting on the systems society has built up around medicine rendering self-diagnosis necessary for many before a medical diagnosis is able to be a viable option. An example of this is the disparity between men and women able to receive medical diagnoses for ADHD and Autism, as these are both neuro divergences that present themselves differently in girls and boys. While boys often take on traits that are more commonly stereotyped for said disorders, traits of ADHD and Autism in young girls are frequently dismissed as being traits of docile femininity instead. For this reason, neurodivergent women are far less likely to receive the attention required in order to achieve a medical diagnosis, and self-diagnosis becomes crucial in ensuring they do not go any longer in their lives wondering if there is something wrong with them, and the way they live. Self-diagnosis is a process that involves an abundance of research and self-reflection in order to reach a conclusion that can answer pressing, health-related questions about any given person and their supposedly mysterious struggles. It is dismissive and ignorant to reduce self-diagnosis to an attention-seeking malpractice with ill intent, as this only further stigmatizes mental illness, and gate keeps necessary diagnoses to those with privileged means to go through the highly convoluted diagnosing process.

Despite this, when most people refer to self-diagnosis and chastise it, they are speaking about those who appear to be faking their mental illness, rather than thoroughly researching before they make their claim. Those young girls torn apart online for publicising their depression, rendering it invalid in the eyes of social media, or those who shake their hands a little too vigorously in TikTok trends determined to show off one’s level of anxiety. These are the true villains, right? The ones ruining it for the truly depressed people? The ones who are turning everybody else’s torment into a joke? Growing up, I was somebody who incessantly shamed those who were seemingly faking their mental illness, or embellishing their trauma. I believed that the neurotypical and non-mentally ill would never take myself and my community seriously if all we became known for was the illegitimate, attention-hogging, disingenuous people who knew not even a morsel of our true distress. However, if one takes a moment to dissect the supposed falsehoods told by those faking their depression, ask yourself: what mentally well person would publicly fake a disorder for attention, if not a misguided and inappropriate call for help? After all, just like television stars cannot fake singing badly without knowing how to do so well, one cannot merely pretend to be sad without some form of unanswered inner turmoil.

Mental illness and neurodivergence are autonomous responses to chemical or psychological needs not being met, and not all mental illnesses will be clinical and chronic, which proves confusing for those without diagnoses who feel the same effects of mental disorders plaguing their lives without any explanations offered up. Whether you would like to believe it or not, mentally well people do not partake in eroticizing their torture online. They may not be clinically depressed and they may not be clinically anxious but something here is so fundamentally wrong that all they can do to soothe these crushing pains is use the vocabulary provided to them, because it is our society that had convinced them their suffering is not yet critical enough to warrant seeking the help they need.

I, like many others, have lied awake, sticky eyed, sleepless, praying to gods I do not believe in to strike me with unforgiving tragedy. Something cruel and life-wrecking which could justify the ceaseless sadness and inexplicable melancholia I am afflicted with for seemingly no reason at all. I think desperately that then, and only then will my trauma be worth something. Will my sadness live up to the standard of somebody who is truthfully depressed. Instead of shaming the young and confused preteens ridiculed on r/i’m14andthisisdeep, or the easy to target lonely poets online, wonder first about the fortress you are putting up, brick by brick, around what and what cannot count as mental distortion, only ostracising yourself and the community further into cavernous, heavily policed shadows. Before we become harassers, crooning mockingly on the next self-diagnosing internet joke, wonder why it has become necessary: what we have done to cause this, and how we can stop it.

So, where does this leave us? If diagnosed depressed people are really depressed, and undiagnosed depressed people can also be depressed, and people who fake being depressed are also possibly depressed, then, is everybody depressed? The statement alone reeks of insincerity, and grotesque pessimism running so deep it cannot possibly be true. Still, the idea which has been festering in humankind that there is some kind of invisible cap-off on the number of people ‘allowed’ to be mentally ill is one that needs to be systemically deconstructed through the de-isolation of neurodivergent and mentally ill people, and the acceptance that depression and other illnesses will always manifest in diverse and oftentimes alarming and grating ways. This is not to say that self-diagnosing is to be completely absolved of possible harm, and it would be deceitful to not acknowledge the real possibilities of invalidation through faking mental illness. However, we cannot continue to let a written diagnosis be the be-all and end-all of mental illness, as these reductionist views are inaccessible and exclusionary to many different kinds of neuroses that we are simply not yet aware of.

I can’t tell sometimes if I’m depressed, or if I just had a really shitty Tuesday. I don’t know what to answer when asked how I am, because I am aware my answer would merit seeking help, but I do not want to overstate myself and encroach on a diagnosis that is not my own. This overwhelming fear of misconstruing my own misery, even to myself, is one born of being excluded from a space I am scared to admit I belong in, and as we continue to shun people from accepting their own sadness is valid, we continue to let grow the populous of aimless tragic people. Maybe it’s true. Maybe there are too many depressed people nowadays, more than mankind was meant to sustain, more than feels realistic. If this is the case, we need not turn away, but rather adapt our support systems, cradle the tortured, and help all to properly recover.