So this is an issue that's been rather normalized across communities such as deviantArt and Tumblr ever since 2012 but it seems kids younger and younger are adopting this kind of behavior without fully understanding what they're really doing. This behavior has also been normalized on Scratch with a lot of younger artists, but specially in the kitty community. So first of all there are these quizzes online in which will try to tell you if you have symptoms of a disorder by asking rather basic questions. So for example, some ten year old could stumble across one of these and get told they have "crippling depression" just because they feel sad when something upsetting happens. The issue within this should be obvious. These kids then exploit their newfound 'disorder' by listing it on their profile to get special attention. This inspires other individuals to mimic the same behavior because they believe it would give them the same advantages. Hence it creates a cycle. When so many disorders become 'normalized' then they aren't taken seriously which can negatively affect the lives of people who honestly suffer with them on a rather drastic level. Take people with depression and anxiety which seem to be the two most popular 'trends' nowadays. People with depression are NOT going to be taken seriously when they're associated with this sort of misguided community. They're not going to get the help or the treatment they need because doctors are so used to communicating with these kids who honestly don't know what they're talking about. They begin to hesitate on diagnosing a child because they just cannot take it seriously. This causes the child and the family trauma because the individual is not getting the treatment they need fast enough. Since so many children say they have 'anxiety' all because they get nervous or they get butterflies when frightening things happen or when they're approached with a flustering situation and now people act as if it's such a cute thing to have. Anxiety is a lot more than getting stage fright or getting butterflies when your crush approaches you and because this behavior is so popular everyone just assumes that because we feel emotions we must have a disorder. I don't want to make this to long so I'm going to end it here but before I do I wanna address that this is not a callout to anyone and that we're addressing the community as whole. This rant was written by @kinetiic but I wanted to address this anyway, I just didn't know where to start. Also credit to @kinetiic for the absolutely stunning artwork.
