Quantcast
Channel: Planet Ivy » Florence Bell
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2

Suicide blogs: The kids are not alright

0
0

Is boycotting Tumblr really the way to deal with this new teenage trend?

Last week a dark corner of the internet was brought to light when the details of an inquest into the suicide of 15-year-old Tallulah Wilson made headlines. Wilson’s mother called for sites such as Tumblr to be boycotted by advertisers, as she blamed them for hosting a “toxic world” that she lost her daughter to.

For the broadsheet reading chattering classes this is shocking – a talented, privileged, much loved teenager taking her own life because of an obsession with a baffling world of online imagery. But for the users of these sites, talking about subjects such as suicide, self-harm and anorexia happens every day – a subculture that exists below the radar, out of sight of responsible eyes. In 2012, Tumblr banned any material containing pro-suicide or pro-self harm content, but because this rule relies on other users flagging or reporting it, the community can protect themselves from censorship. “Sometimes I honestly lose myself and don’t know what to do and when that happens, Tumblr is where I express myself,” commented one user on the site. “It is the only one I can count on to not judge me or make me feel even worse and for that I am truly thankful.”

Visually, there’s a reawakening in a 90s aesthetic. Depression, suicide and a grunge ‘I don’t give a fuck’ doctrine has hooked yet another wave of Cobain memorabilia fans. It’s not just an occasional photo or heart wrenching confession, a desire not to live, not to care for living, has become a trend.

blogs2

Instagram tinged photos of skinny boys and black eyed girls, “I love you” written on a sink in blood, a lot of pictures of people smoking and then occasionally, perfectly in tune with everything else, a gif of a girl from Skins saying how much she wants to kill herself. Others play The Smiths as an endless sequence of words and imagery rolls across the screen. Certain rhetoric is present and repetitive: nobody understands, I’m tired of everything, I hope my absence makes them lonely. Although hundreds of these blogs pop up, one person emerges clearly, one identity. A girl, aged between 12 and 15. She has been bullied for being fat, for being a whore. She thinks beyond any reasonable doubt that she is ugly. She fetishises drugs and any other kind of harmful action she can take against herself. She cuts herself – or likes the idea of it – she doesn’t talk to her parents, she hates school and everyone there. She doesn’t see the point in living. She does like Tumblr. There are thousands like her. Love is cruel, being alive can be lonely and Lana Del Rey is on to something. 

tumblr_n057meR68h1t8sawco1_500

Maybe it was just the people I chose to hang around with at school, but teenagers have always flippantly talked about killing themselves. They’ve always been reluctant to talk to their parents. Now though, kids grow up with the internet as if it’s a older sibling: trusted and accepted, an extension of themselves. When they have feelings or opinions they aren’t scrawled in a Groovy Chick diary or on a pencil case, they’re packaged like a mood board for a marketing campaign and sent out to be reviewed by thousands of others online. But they’re the same thoughts and feelings kids had a decade ago, and severing the means with which they express themselves (or removing them altogether) is not only short-sighted but seems to go against everything that seems healthy. I’m no mental health professional but acceptance and transparency are better than repression and silence, right? The fear here doesn’t come from young girls going shut off and silent, in fact they’re screaming louder than ever before. The fear is that they have abandoned the proper channels of guidance that are supposed to help them. 

blogs

When I visited a doctor at 15 due to chronic panic attacks (I was having 15 to 30 attacks a day for no reason) I was immediately prescribed anti-depressants rather than counselling, or even someone telling me to breathe properly. I turned them down, not wishing to take drugs as a first resort and also being confused as to how they would help. I know other young women who didn’t say no and have been on these drugs ever since. If this is indicative of how mental health is treated by the people we are expected to turn to, it’s no wonder young people don’t. It’s no wonder they instead turn to a community where they can share experiences and images without being judged or simply prescribed drugs.

This is the generation that have to live with the fact Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber are icons of their time. They live in a world where people write songs about rape and steal Marvin Gaye’s music to set them to. A cultural lull has taken root so deep that XFM now play the Rolling Stones back catalogue and art has become so entrenched in corporate sponsorship it barely exists any more. Yet celebrity culture flourishes and the porn industry, almost entirely unmoderated, makes its way into the minds and hearts of young people, unrealistic ideas of female beauty filling computer screens as well as glossy magazine pages. Is it any wonder the two areas of anxiety woven through these blogs are a) being fat or b) being a whore?

I had a discussion over Christmas with a family member who said the internet was a force for bad, I disagreed. The internet is, for anyone born after 1989 and as something we created as humans, an empty vessel that we fill, an extension of ourselves, and because of this – like in life – its good side is often overshadowed by its bad. We can’t denounce that older sibling because they’re badly behaved and make us look bad as parents, chances are we made them that way. Same can be said of the internet and Tumblr, which dark and foreboding as it might have become, signifies nothing less that a generation saying ‘fuck this’ to the world they live in, en masse, with pictures. Maybe we should listen to them.

images: fuck-me-till-im-grunge and acidteenz on tumblr

The post Suicide blogs: The kids are not alright appeared first on Planet Ivy.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images