Is it time to stop all the wellbeing memes?

What do you feel about wellbeing memes? A fairly broad concept that can means your Facebook feed filling up with video, images and words. I am thinking here about word memes with a picture or image in the background. I ask because they seem to be increasing in number and right about now, I am guessing your social media accounts are full of Covid 19-related memes. Also because clients are mentioning how they impact them.

At first glance they seem quite harmless. Often meant as uplifting or affirming statements about ignoring the anger or cruelty in others; feeling better about ourselves because we deserve it, and so on. Therapy is in part about supporting someone to be emotionally and mentally where they want to be and this made me wonder if memes play a role in this process.

A quick global review of therapists’ pages on Facebook, for example would suggest that many feel memes have value. Given the hundreds of comments and Likes that these appear to generate perhaps there is some truth in it.

However, I have doubts. A University of Copenhagen study suggested excessive use of social media can create feelings of envy. That got me thinking about how we experience and engage with social media. The research found that constantly viewing images of the lives of others through Facebook induced ‘unrealistic social comparisons’ and a ‘deterioration of mood’.

What impact, then might be delivered by all these apparently affirming memes if they are, in fact, unrealistic? I question whether life, and the challenges we face, really can be tackled by just thinking positive thoughts. If I repeat a mantra that Happiness is when you feel good about yourself without the need for anyone else’s approval, does that become true for me. Does someone locked in a relationship of unbalanced power have the inner strength to throw off the shackles of mental abuse without support.

In a recent edition of a college campus newspaper in Philadelphia, Brittany Valentine goes further, to argue that 'mental health memes portray serious issues like depression and suicide as light-hearted jokes'. That they ignore the reality of psychological conditions that are experienced as life-debilitating.

In part I agree with her. I have never found life to be as easy as a meme can suggest. By pretending it is, there is a danger that we diminish the challenges being faced. To reduce better mental health to a few words and a picture seems dismissive and in that process we surely ignore the needs of the person. That is not to suggest that these memes should stop, to answer my own question. For others they are life-affirming and a pleasure to read in the moment, or indeed, as Brittany suggests, some can start a debate around mental health that is useful.

Rather it is to ask that memes are not considered the answer to the complex experiences of us all. How we make contact with others and the world around us. This is the realm of self-reflection and perhaps, when needed, therapy. 

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