Depressed people prefer black humor to those in the healthy control group and are more likely to believe that disease-related memes can help combat depression, according to a psychological study published in mid-January. Patients with the disease were more likely to identify with the black humorous myths of isolation, death, and suicide, but they processed the jokes differently than the healthy control group, mainly because depressed people treat their negative feelings differently from their healthy peers.
The research looked at the responses of a total of two hundred participants and asked subjects to rate the memes shown to them. The group had to rate the jokes from one to five based on how they identify with them, how they find them funny, how much they share with others, and how much they find them mood enhancing. In addition to depression-related memes, neutral jokes were used, and in these cases, jokes had to be evaluated against similar criteria.
According to psychologists, dark humor is a form of cognitive reassessment: depressed people tend to re-evaluate their everyday experiences, and one form of this is that they do not emphasize positive reading of an event, but rather make it worse and make it worse. joke. Researchers believe that depressed people are more likely to identify with dark humor because of their condition, but using memes can more easily communicate their feelings with their peers, and even by relying on them, they may be aware that they are not alone, like them.
That’s why they talk about it
The hashtags #depression and #anxiety have been used on thirty million Instagram posts, and there are tons of memes – which is no wonder, since they are made of pretty much everything, and anxiety and depression are hit topics. Many are afraid that jokes will not take mental illness seriously, and in fact, it will be somewhat fashionable to shout wolves and pose as depressed.
While social media is flooded with posts about depression (TikTok is full of them), not everyone is convinced that such jokes help patients. According to Dustin Johnson, a psychologist at Auburn University, in addition to ridiculing the problem, patients may find their records humiliating and offensive, which can seriously hurt them.
Johnson says that being a meme without a face, keeping the problem away from one another can express what you feel and see that others are wearing similar shoes, but it can also help diagnose diseases: despite the fact that many people think they are serious problems, at least, come to the surface, and depressed people feel less stigmatized than before. According to the expert, however, there is no meme that can replace the therapy, and no Twitter message can replace professional help.
