Your Mental Illness Is My Joke!

 Humor is a very complicated and confusing thing. If I were to ever continue my university studies in linguistics, I think I would potentially pick a phenomenon somehow related to humor as a rhetorical device. It is used in countless different ways, in situations that are more or less applicable to a humorous conversation. These factors, too, are more or less defined by the parties involved in the discussion. This kind of subjectivity makes humor an impossible thing to define in an exact manner, because what someone else might deem as the joke of the century might be an incredibly offensive thing to say to someone else. 

Unfortunately, though, in the context of this blog article, this kind of academic analysis is not possible (nor the end-goal, for that matter), so we are going to have to simplify things a little bit. I can admit that there are objective and analytic factors to the problem of humor as a rhetorical device, particularly from the perspective of linguistics. And as much as I love that train of thought, I want to make a distinction here: this article is meant as a subjective opinion on the ethics and morals of talking about mental illnesses and trauma in a joking manner, especially when those are not used as a coping mechanism.

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Sometimes I wish I'd taken a screenshot every time I see someone making a joke about trauma and post-traumatic symptoms on the internet. It is truly baffling to me how there seems to be a huge community of people who think PTSD is the funniest fucking shit ever. The misunderstanding of the term "flashback" is exhausting and repetitive, and I wonder what the cause for this might have been, and where we made that irrefutable mistake. Because, sure, people do make ableist jokes about other mental illnesses too (first thing that comes to mind is psychotic delusions). But PTSD and trauma flashbacks have been the butt of the joke for years by now in online spaces – for no real reason. 

ptsd!

Before I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in 2022, I was first diagnosed with PTSD in 2020. I was experiencing multiple symptoms of PTSD at the beginning of my freshman year in uni since I had moved to a different city, away from the environment where the majority of my trauma took place. I had intense flashbacks, agitation, restlessness, paranoia, and recurring trauma nightmares every night, which resulted in chronic insomnia. 

It has been a year or something since I experienced the last proper flashback. My experiences of reliving my trauma nowadays are more so in the form of vivid memories resurfacing after the two-decade long dissociation opened its curtains. Because the thing is, that flashbacks are NOT memories. They are not the same thing as you consciously going back to a past time and place in your memories; flashbacks are completely involuntary, and they make you relive the traumatic experience AGAIN as if you were there experiencing it now, with the emotions and physical sensations, everything. I remember being able to smell the air inside the elementary school building when having flashbacks. That does not happen with memories.

"Do you remember the slime craze on YouTube in the early 2010's??? GIRL, that shit gave me PTSD, what the fuck were we doingg????"

"I only have to hear that ONE SPECIFIC NOTE, and I'm having fucking flashbacks to my emo phase!! SO CRINGE!!"

It is a different story when you are joking about your own real, actual mental illnesses and trauma to cope with the shit you're going through. But when you use the label of a diagnosis and its symptoms as your poor punchlines, you are doing nothing but boasting your ableism to everyone involved in the conversation. And to me, that is far more cringier than anything embarrassing you might have liked as a teenager.

Trust me, I'm NOT-,

ichigonya