This is a complicated topic for me. I’m 35 so my experience is obviously different than today, but I self-harmed from age 12 into my 20s. Finding community and understanding in self-harm & mental illness-focused communities was transformative for me, especially in my younger teens. Many days/months/years this community felt like the only reason I was still hanging on.
Obviously I am not in favor of the “encouragement” of self-harm, but I also wonder how much nuance is applied when categorizing content as such. For example, is someone who posts about how badly they want to self-harm “encouraging” this? Or are they just seeking support? Idk. I have no answers. I just think about how even bleaker my teens would have felt had I not found my pockets of community on the early internet. On the other hand, sometimes I do wonder if we subconsciously egged each other on. Perhaps the trajectory of my mental health journey would have been different had I not found them. That’s not something I can ever be sure about, but I think given my home life and all the things I was going through already, if anything, my mental illness might have just manifested itself in a different way, like through substance abuse issues or an eating disorder or something. (And to be clear, I was hurting myself before I found the community, so it might have just been business as usual.) Like I said, I don’t have any answers, it just feels more nuanced to me, as someone who has lived some version of this.
Whenever we would hear “Crimson and Clover” growing up, my dad would comment how Tommy James (the singer) killed himself in the 70s. Cut to like 5 years ago when I see Tommy James, in his 70s, still kickin’, on some random public access programming lol.
My dad has been repeating this “fact” for so many years that there’s a solid chance he’s forgotten it isn’t true and still says it whenever he hears “Crimson and Clover.”