More questions, more answers or more troubles?
The part of media in young people’s lives WORDS BY THEA HARTMAN IMAGE BY AMANDA JACKSON, ILLUSTRATION BY BETHANY WESTALL
It’s hard to be young. The ‘we’re all carefree and always doing whatever we want’ mantra is not really like that anymore, if it was ever so. The image of the rebellious, aloof teenager growing up to become God-knows-what only contours the meaning of youth. There is a storm constantly rumbling on inside, a storm that slips into anxiety or depression incredibly easy, and lately, the cases of young people facing mental illnesses have increased. The involvement of the media in this rise of mental health issues is a double-edged sword: media is the one raising awareness about mental health issues, but it’s also the one that considerably contributes to their building up. Repeatedly displaying the images of the ‘perfect’ life, body, relationship, house etc., in magazines, on television, in films or ads, putting additional pressure on the shoulders of the young who are, by definition, always on the brink of cracking. Trying to sort out a balance in life while the questions ‘Who am I? ‘What do I want to be when I grow up? What are people going to think about this choice?’ loom right over your head, is not an easy thing when you have no idea about anything. These questions are answered by the media who more or less subtly impose its ideas of perfection: we should all be slender or have a six-pack like cover models, we should all dream of the traditional family with parents, two children and a dog in front of a big house. That’s what we see in films and on social media, that’s what people like; and confirmation is vital for the youth searching for some solid ground to stand on. But what happens
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when your answers are not the same as the ones given by the media? What happens when you’re two sizes bigger than all those people you see on TV, when you feel you don’t belong in an academic environment like you should, when you’re not a family person and you just feel yourself diverging from everything you’ve ever seen or heard? That’s when you crack. Panic attacks, anxiety, depression, self-harm. For not being pretty enough, or strong enough, or smart enough, not like the girl on that show or the guy in that film. Scrolling over social media pages every day and knowing so much about how everyone lives their lives, the mistakes they make and how harshly they’re judged for them, reading lifestyle blogs with all their do’s and their don’t’s: they’re all there to give the tiny push needed to slip into an unhealthy mental life. They come as an additional gift of the technology era, when we all get more information thrown at us than we’re able to process and are left questioning ourselves and our choices more than our parents and our grandparents used to when they were our age. Yes, it’s hard to be young in a world where ‘nobody’s perfect’, yet we see the supposed image of perfection everywhere and try to define ourselves with that image in mind. It’s easy to slip on the way towards finding ourselves, and asking for help and support on this way might sometimes be exactly what is needed to calm the storm inside and get a bit of a clearer sky to look at.
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