In March 2024, I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and started a therapy course called DBT. I’m in the middle of a year-and-a-half long treatment programme on the NHS, which is good.
I’ve experienced a lot of challenges with my anxiety and it’s been quite a struggle getting the help I’ve really needed. It’s taken me 10 years to get to the point where the NHS has pulled through and I’ve got support from them. I’ve also been having private therapy.
I’ve done work with Samaritans about self-harm and online safety and both of those have been quite prominent in my life in the past couple of years. At the moment I would say my wellbeing is rocky and I have ups and downs.
Being diagnosed with BPD has been really interesting – there’s a lot of opinions in the medical world, and it can be seen as quite a controversial label. I struggled a lot with it at the beginning and was very resistant to accepting it. However, the more specific support I got, the more I could see the benefits of the diagnosis and it’s had a much more positive impact because I’m getting support for the specific challenges I face, which I’ve never had before.
Online challenges
I have accounts on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and probably spend a few hours on them on an average day. I took some time offline during the pandemic – a sort of digital detox – to help me manage my time online a bit better. When I re-downloaded my accounts, I left all my apps on the last page of my phone, so they’re a few more clicks away and I don’t get notifications. All these small changes make a difference to my mental health online.
There are lots of different pressures I face being online, particularly on social media. This can be anything from comparing my life to my friends or influencers, to comparing my appearance and the way I look. I also used to rely on social media to occupy me. It can be easy to fall into a spiral and become obsessed with keeping up to date – to keep constantly connected.
My personal profile on social media is very much in the mental health activism space. But in terms of my actual usage day to day, I think like lots of people, I fall down a bit of a rabbit hole a lot of the time. There have been times when it has negatively affected my mental health. When I’m in a bad headspace I find I look at more negative content and then that’s all I’m shown. It’s hard to change the algorithm and get out of that spiral. This would be me searching for it first, in really harmful places.
Sometimes I search for things on Instagram which are blocked, which can be frustrating but is also good. I’ve come off TikTok because I found that particularly damaging for my mental health. It was something I had to take myself away from because it felt harder to break the cycle.
Most of what you see online isn’t real or isn’t the whole truth. I really try and use my platform to be as honest as possible; I share personal reflections and campaigns I’ve been a part of. It can be overwhelming a lot of the time because you get a lot of messages, but it’s also really rewarding, so I’m happy to do it.
It’s fine to be open and honest and vent online but I often think people post things without really thinking about the consequence it might have on others who see it. I think around the topic of suicide, I’ve seen some conversations that are started on platforms that aren’t moderated by social media companies but should be.
Elsa
Young people and social media
When I was younger, in my early teens, I really struggled with low mental health. I think at school, I was surrounded by friends who were also struggling, which made things worse – we dragged each other down. It’s a funny age where you’re trying to work things out. Being on social media at that point, which of course I was, made things more challenging. I was seeing things online that I shouldn’t have seen and that content influenced my behaviour.
To me, it feels like there is almost a fear in teachers talking about the issues and challenges that we’re facing, and when it is spoken about, it’s done negatively. Again, I think it goes back to the whole lack of acknowledgement that social media is a real part of young people’s lives, in both a positive and negative sense, and there should be a lot more awareness of this within education.
I think there is so much that can be done offline to support issues online. Often people think all the solutions to problems young people are facing online need to be solved on the same platforms. Acknowledging the challenge that social media companies face too, local communities and especially schools have a huge role to play as well in properly educating about some of the relevant issues and how young people can manage them.
Individuals having more control over their profile and timelines is one thing that can be really empowering for young people – you don’t need to follow or engage with certain people or hashtags.
Building connections
There are many positives to social media. It’s given me a lot of opportunities to connect and engage with people from different backgrounds and communities – it’s meant I can learn from others. Forming friendships is sometimes easier online than in person, particularly if you struggle with anxiety. I can also enjoy positive content, like something inspirational to lift my mood. I think young people can find others with similar values to themselves and that’s a real positive.
Making friends online still carries a bit of stigma and it shouldn’t. Sometimes young people can feel really isolated with their online presence just because adults don’t always understand, and this leads to young people feeling like they are constantly being judged and misunderstood. This can lead to a separation from support networks and mean young people don’t always reach out for help when they feel they might need it, for fear of being misunderstood. The online world isn’t separate from the real world, especially for young people.
Societal judgement
It frustrates me that social media is labelled as a young person’s problem. If young people are struggling with their mental health, people can jump straight to social media as the reason. I think there’s a lot of judgement around social media from society. I also think this narrative of social media being a young people’s problem is harmful for adults because it reinforces the idea of, ‘You’re an adult, you should understand how to identify fake news and how to identify harmful content.’ I don’t think that’s fair to anyone.
Similarly, you don’t become less vulnerable just because you turn 18. The last few years I’ve noticeably transitioned into adulthood but that was a few years after turning 18. I think there is a narrative than when you become an adult you’re expected to just deal with these things and grow up a little bit.
I think it’s so important to validate adults’ experiences who have struggled and continue to struggle with the things they were dealing with when they were younger. Things don’t just disappear once you’re an adult – that’s a really important message.