A speech written by Joanne Lee
I am dying, drowning, descending, I’m sinking, suffocating, struggling, I’m falling, fading, floundering, plummeting, plunging down deeper and deeper and deeper. But it’s okay, I’m okay, it’s all okay. Tens of billions of tiny grains pile upon me, their weight is crushing my chest and all I see are bursts of stars. But it’s fine, I’m fine, it’s all fine. It fills my lungs until all I know is the discomfort and the pain of losing what keeps me alive. I can’t breathe, I can’t move, I can’t see. Help me. The more I try to break free the worse it becomes. I didn’t see it coming, until I was chest deep, until it consumed me. I didn’t know that I was in The Sandpit until it was too late.
Ladies and gentlemen, that is a description of how my anxiety feels, it sounds scary right? Perhaps it’s actually all too familiar to many of us here tonight, perhaps you yourself have felt this way or you know someone who has experienced a mental illness. A mental illness is a health problem that significantly affects how a person feels, thinks, behaves, and interacts with other people. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics one in five Australians aged 16–85 years currently have a mental disorder. This is obviously a huge issue that faces our modern day society as these figures increase year by year, adding grain upon grain as more people enter into The Sandpit.
I’m sure you’re all aware of the stigmatism that surrounds mental illness and is still pertained today, many of us still lack an understanding and an awareness of what mental illness really is. I suppose you could say that our heads are still in the sand. The word stigma is actually interchangeable with words such as dishonour and disgrace, it’s the mark of Cain in the Bible, it's the ‘A’ on the dress in the Scarlett Letter and it’s the yellow star stitched onto the clothes of Jews in Nazi Germany. Retrospect has given us the power to see why each of these ideologies and events were wrong, so why does mental illness still carry the burden of stigma to this day?
Over the centuries stigma, has grown from many cultural, religious and societal values and prejudices. This stigma was historically created because the general public had the misconceptions that those with mental illnesses are perpetually angry, violent and dangerous. Early beliefs from religious body’s stated that mental illness was caused by demonic or spirit possession, these ‘explanations’ almost certainly gave rise to reactions of caution, fear and discrimination, Imagine if a fiery demon was about to pop out of me right now, you would be terrified. However, as the sands of time have trickled away, the principles and teachings surrounding mental health have improved astronomically and modern day has provided significant resources and solutions to combat this horrific sandstorm.
But I believe there is a new form of stigma, that’s not as obvious to the naked eye and the average mind, but it is still as detrimental as the prior ones. The vehicle of this new stigma is mass social media, a Sahara desert in comparison to the sand pit. All of you here tonight I would imagine participate in the media in some form or fashion, parents read the news, teens have social media and kids watch cartoons. Since its creation the media has trivialised mental illness grievously, it downplays the notability and negativity of this issue. You may not realise this but all forms of media have managed to taint our perception, the news labels individuals with schizophrenia as ‘crazy’, social media normalises eating disorders and cartoons depict characters suffering from OCD as merely clean freaks and perfectionists.
We scroll through supposed “perfect lives” everyday and we ask ourselves why we can’t have that life and feel as though we are the only ones struggling. Plenty of studies have found correlations between higher social media use and poorer mental health, including depression, anxiety, feelings of loneliness and isolation, lower self-esteem, and even notions of suicide. We subconsciously compare our insides to other people’s outsides, highlight reels vs B roll. I for one have spent hours upon hours, scroll upon scroll, comparing myself negatively to my peers but to my surprise they share similar feelings of inadequacy, we all experience it no matter who we are. Social media is a weapon of mass destruction which we all have access to 24/7. Social media is, in essence, an instigator for mental illness and the continuous stigmatism surrounding it, it fills the sandpit second by second.
But how do we solve this? Do we ban all media? Shut down instagram, facebook and twitter? Suppress certain news stories? Deprive twelve year old of Tik Tok? Outlaw wacky cartoons? No, an Orwellian society, I’m sure we can all agree, is not a reality I or anyone else would likely enjoy. As individuals, we consume media as a way of education and entertainment and to suppress it could do more harm than good.
We need to learn how to produce media accurately, to portray mental illness correctly and stop using words like “crazy” and “deranged” in a derogatory or flippant fashion. We should acknowledge the unhealthy standards of perfection social media imposes on us and limit the usage of these platforms. We can create healthy dialogue in our communities instead, ones that promote the treatment and support of those dealing with these illnesses and educate peers about them. We should begin to socialise children from a young age to be a filter rather than a sponge when they interact with media. This apocalyptic weapon has the potential to become revolutionary in creating change for the better if we learn to use it wisely.
You may feel as small and insignificant as a singular grain right now, but trust me, I have begun building sandcastles out of my sand pit. Eventually, by working together we can erect magnificent pyramids of change because the Sandpit Syndrome is curable.
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