Suicide Memes Might Actually Be Therapeutic
In a recent post to the popular meme-sharing platform 9gag, two side-by-side storybook illustrations depict a girl watching snowflakes fall outside her bedroom window. The left panel is titled “kids then”: In a thought bubble, the girl wistfully muses, “I sure hope they cancel school for all this snow.” The right panel is “kids now.” The girl looks at the snow outside and thinks, “I hope a car loses traction on the ice and rams into me and I fucking die tomorrow.”
This is a joke—and apparently a very relatable one for its target demographic, the millions of Generation Y and Z digital natives for whom memes are a mother tongue. A casual scroll on 9gag, which receives 3.5 billion page views a month, will turn up dozens of memes daily about self-harm or wanting to die, and young people are sharing, retweeting, and reblogging similar content across the social-media landscape. You’ll find storybook illustrations doctored to show children dreaming of grisly deaths, SpongeBob joyfully flailing to his doom during a bank stickup, and Obama about to throw himself off a bridge.
At first blush, these jokes couldn’t be in poorer taste. The World Health Organization ranks suicide as the staggering 70 and 77 percent increases in suicide rates of white and black teens, respectively, between 2006 and 2016. In response, public-health officials and tech giants alike have been cracking down on potentially dangerous messaging on self-harm. Last Friday, Instagram a new policy banning “graphic” depictions of self-harm or suicide.
