The Fleabag Era
Oct 2022
How We Neglect and Glamorize the Impacts of Mental Illness
Disha Chatterjee
With the bright assortment of colorful infographics spilling into everyone’s timelines, and the words “you are not alone!” plastered in cute fonts across our social media feeds, it’s certain that over the last decade or so there has been an increased focus on mental health, and a recurrent idea being perpetuated that we, as a collective, have drawn awareness to, destigmatized, and now deeply care about mental illnesses. A simple Google search can redirect you to the number of a 24/7 crisis hotline, Twitter threads will list the names of various national mental health organizations, universities send emails to the student body with information about on-campus counseling services… it seems glaringly apparent that help is at our fingertips and everyone cares about mental health in today’s wellness culture climate.
Amidst our awareness campaigns, we fail to be aware of the unfortunate realities of how mental health is really addressed in this country. How many who promote these dauntingly long lists of phone numbers have actually reached out to one of the national crisis hotlines and are aware of the fact that between sobs you’ll be put on hold for 10 minutes and connected with someone who can hardly understand you over the phone; how many are aware of just how jarring it can be to magically open up to a complete stranger during a time of crisis? Are universities aware that when you attempt to utilize their counseling services, you might find that the next available appointment will take weeks to schedule due to the spike in demand and the critical shortage of those providing services?
At the surface level, institutions paint a picturesque view of how mental illness is treated: the quippy slogans, aesthetically pleasing resource guides, and emotionally charged verbiage make it easy to believe your health is their number one priority. However, there’s a sharp disconnect between the way mental health and physical health are treated, despite falling under the same umbrella of well-being. Although glitzy social media campaigns aren’t being launched to draw awareness to physical health issues, it’s apparent that physical illness is treated much more seriously than its mental counterpart: showing proof of a recent concussion will excuse your absence from class, but seeking a few mental health days to recover from the burnout associated with the intense academic burden many students face at university will likely not result in the same leniency. The resources many struggling students are referred to during their times of need turn out to be far more inaccessible than they seem. While a referral to an off-campus therapist sounds like a simple option when on-campus services are stretched too thin to be effective, hassles with insurance and going through the arduous process alone make it more challenging for students to get set up with professional support than administrations would like to admit.
Beyond the mere difficulties of seeking professional services, our societal values and norms sustain challenges to mental health rather than combat them. The capitalistic, profits-over-people message deeply ingrained in our work culture forces us to prioritize a narrow definition of success over our health, only reluctantly taking breaks when the tangible effects of physical or mental issues begin interfering severely. Students will exhaust themselves with intense course loads and put pressure on themselves to achieve high GPAs at the expense of learning to build healthy habits during this crucial, initial phase of their independent life. There are far too many instances where I overhear stories of all-nighters during weeknights and blacking out on the weekends, stories that are fairly commonplace on college campuses despite the fact that sleep is vital to maintaining a stable physical and mental state, and that alcohol, especially when abused to extremes, is a dangerous, unhealthy way to cope with the stressful realities of the college experience. While hosting webinars on the importance of a consistent sleep schedule or the dangers of alcohol as a coping mechanism are all well and good, they do little to address the root of the issue: we live in environments that are inconducive to our health, and we are forced to navigate societal goals of pursuing “success” in unhealthy ways.
It comes as no surprise, then, that trends on social media that several Gen Z-ers engage in begin emphasizing a message of passive acceptance when it comes to battling mental health issues. When the systems and institutions around us fail to make accommodating environments, enabling our mental health issues rather than preventing them, nihilism and apathy begin taking center stage. Stigma around several prominent mental illnesses is still prevalent and misconceptions portrayed in popular culture continue to add to it, but younger populations seek to normalize mental illness, often by posting memes or TikToks that touch on the common experiences we share. The problem arises when social media users tread a dangerously thin line between normalizing and glamorizing. Mental illness is a very real battle many members of all populations face, but when we begin portraying it in ways that treat succumbing to mental illness as a perfectly acceptable, if not desired, way of coping, we begin to have a real problem.
A recent example of one seemingly harmless, humorous trend is that of young women proclaiming they are in their “fleabag era.” The concept is named after the titular character of the television show by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag, which chronicles a dry-witted woman attempting to navigate life and cope with tragedy. RadioTimes describes Fleabag as “broke, sarcastic, engulfed by grief, porn-obsessed and pretending that everything is totally, absolutely fine” (Delgado). In a similar vein, content creators will chronicle their self-destructive tendencies, whether it’s as simple as sleeping in eyeliner or as devastating as restricting diets to 250 calories in a day. They end with a simple “in my fleabag era.” These young women find a cruel comfort in their unhealthy behaviors, almost putting it on a pedestal by romanticizing the image of a depressed, detached heroine who is unfazed as they continue to inflict emotional damage to themselves and potentially others. Emmeline Clein describes it best in her article, “The Smartest Women I Know are All Dissociating,” writing, “We now seem to be interiorizing our existential aches and angst, smirking knowingly at them, and numbing ourselves to maintain our nonchalance.”
By curating a carefully crafted image of sensationalized mental illness, we create the facade that we are indifferent to our internal battle, that we are cool, composed and collected in the face of these incredibly difficult struggles. By minimizing our depressive states down to a reference to a television character, we attempt to make our existence more palatable to those around us. In her essay “standing on the shoulders of complex female characters,” Rayne Fisher-Quann writes, “i’m not unwell or self-destructive or entirely unbearable — i’m in my fleabag era! we rationalize our own suffering through the romanticization of those who have suffered before us and, in turn, we provide a blueprint for the hot-girl suffering of those after. we commodify that rationalization through the era-appropriate medium… these roundups of cultural trends and authors du jour often implicitly serve to chicly signal one’s mental illnesses to the public.”
There’s no doubt that the false promises of today’s institutions do not guarantee better tomorrows for those fighting mental illness, and it’s understandable why as a consequence, many turn to the acceptance and romanticization of mental illness as ways to make reality tolerable, but remaining trapped in a “fleabag era” — a passive state of succumbing to our worst internal issues — can only continue for so long before reality does become intolerable. We can only continue to fight — fight our mental illnesses and fight for the systems around us to better serve our needs. Although we may not have made as much progress as companies and institutions like to advertise, it’s true that we have come a long way down the path of destigmatization and awareness, and many are advocating for realistic, actionable changes to be implemented in the arena of mental health. There are many deep-rooted societal issues to address, but change is possible, and it’s up to us to remain optimistic about the future as we criticize systems of the present.
Works Cited
Clein, Emmeline. “The Smartest Women I Know are All Dissociating.” BuzzFeed. 20 Nov. 2019.
Delgado, Kasia. “Fleabag Is an Unflinching, Clever Look at Tricky Youth, Terrible Sex and Self-Destruction.” RadioTimes. 21 Aug. 2016.
Fisher-Quann, Rayne. “standing on the shoulders of complex female characters.” internet princess. 6 Feb. 2022.
Disha Chatterjee is from Houston, TX and studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.