Why do we keep on joking that we're killing ourselves?
If you're a highschooler who happens to have working ears, you've probably heard multiple people say they want to kill themselves every single day.
It's strange, right?
Suicide is an epidemic. According to the CDC, every 11 minutes, one person dies of suicide. If it's so serious, though, why is it wielded with the same levity as a knock-knock joke?
Hyperbole is the name of the game when it comes to modern meme culture. You aren't mildly annoyed at your teacher, you're crashing out and losing your mind. You aren't laughing at your friend, you just cried laughed so hard your lungs started hurting. Weirdest of all: you aren't sad about your test grade, you're on the verge of suicide. Killing oneself has become the crutch to lean on, the natural progression from the extreme hyperbole that teens favor. If you are trying to be extreme to get a reaction out of people, death is the conclusion- the absolute farthest it can be taken.
Why does it matter?
What I find more interesting is the effects of such jokes. Trivializing such horrible events for a punchline already runs the risk of abstracting the very real pain others go through. By calling on it as a punchline over and over, the issue is watered down and used as a shortcut to shocked laughter, leading to many trivializing and not comprehending the real tragedy suicide is.
Additionally, sometimes speaking and thinking about the same topic can allow it to fester in one's head. In a sense, it allows self-harming language to exist in the brain unchecked and excused off as a joke. By reframing one's thoughts to not jump to suicide as the obvious conclusion to any given problem, it lets the brain focus on healthier, happier ideas and be less doomerist.
Furthermore, morbid jokes can be a very real sign of suicidal thoughts and actions. When everyone uses it so causally and without thought, it heightens the difficulty for concerned onlookers to distinguish between a "haha funny" and a barely veiled call for help.
What can you do?
- Take it out of your vocabulary. It's hard to remove a phrase that is ingrained into your vocabulary. Trust me, I struggle with this a lot; it still lives in my speech patterns more than I would like to admit. Trying to rephrase sentences to be less encouraging of self harm and replacing it with something ridiculous- like rewording "I'm going to kill myself" to "I'm going to change my name and move to Mongolia"- has helped me feel less miserable and awful simply because I'm thinking of the notion of suicide less.
- Call out others. Again, I know it can be scary to speak up, but even just saying "Hey, can we joke about suicide a little less?"can help both you and potentially others.
- Check in on your friends. This especially! No man is an island, and reaching out can mean the world.
It can be easy to believe the things one says doesn't matter. However, the words we say make up the world we live in. Let us try to make that world somewhere everyone wants to live.
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