“She’s being so bipolar today.”
“The weather has been so bipolar lately.”
“I’m really OCD about that.”
“Does anyone with OCD want to come over and clean my house?”
“Keep calm and take your meds.”
“I’m not crazy. I prefer the term mentally hilarious.”
“Give me a second while I consult the voices in my head.”
“I have PTSD about that!”
These are just a few jokes about mental illness. If you search the internet, you can find hundreds. You may think that it’s okay to joke about your own illness. Or you may have a friend or family member that is mentally ill who says they are okay with the jokes. The problem is, joking about mental illness minimizes the seriousness of the disorders, shames those who are suffering from them, and prevents people from getting the help that they need. Not to mention, the Bible clearly says that making fun of anyone in any way is a sin.
Don’t Minimize Someone’s Illness
You would never make fun of someone with cancer or heart disease. I hope you wouldn’t make fun of someone’s dementia or diabetes. So, why is it okay to joke about mental illness?
Joking about any illness minimizes the seriousness of the disease and prevents people from getting help. When my mental illness symptoms started manifesting themselves, I was ashamed. In my mind, mental illness was a joke. It was for crazy people that couldn’t function in society. I didn’t want to associate myself with the stigma. I was completely embarrassed by my symptoms. It took ten years before I sought out help and ten more years before I was accurately diagnosed. If there wasn’t such a stigma about mental illness, I would have sought help sooner.
Why is this so dangerous? A person can go from mentally well to suicidal in a very short period of time. The shame of having mental illness symptoms exacerbates the indicators that something is wrong. When someone is really deep in depression, for example, they are frantically searching for a way out and if they don’t feel like they can say something to anyone, they are going to look to ending the pain permanently.
Why Suicide Is Not A Selfish Act
Attempting suicide is not about getting attention or making the people around them feel bad for not taking their mental illness seriously. Often people who attempt ending their life feel like they are a burden to the people around them and that everyone would be better off if they weren’t around. Ending one’s own pain and relieving their burden to others seems like a good solution. That kind of thinking is not rational, but when you are in that much pain, you aren’t able to think rationally.
Taking one’s own life is usually a last resort. The person feels like they’ve tried everything and they have no other alternative. They’ve carefully weighed all solutions and they feel like they have no choice. While completely untrue, they believe the best solution for everyone is that they just end their life.
For someone who has reached this point, hearing jokes about their illness, whether diagnosed or not, is just one more reason to take their own life.
It’s important to note that someone may be laughing and smiling like everything is alright on the outside, when really they are in pain on the inside. It could look like they have it all together and have a lot of good things to live for. But mental illness does not descriminiate.Your joke could be pushing them that much closer to the edge, even if they’re laughing right alongside you.
Why Making Fun of Others is Unbiblical
You may not mean the jokes you’re telling, and the person you are joking about might laugh along with you, but the reality is that making fun of others is a sin. You may not even be the one telling the joke, but laughing at it affirms the joke and you might as well be the one doing the telling.
Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows, and death is the man who deceives his neighbor and says, “I am only joking!”
Proverbs 26:18-19
Whoever belittles his neighbor lacks sense, but a man of understanding remains silent.
Proverbs 11:6
Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.
Ephesians 4:29
These are just a few passages that make it clear that making fun of anyone lacks righteousness.
You might say that you would be fine with people making fun of you, but that line of thinking, in my opinion, is just evidence of your own insecurity. Anyone who needs to bring others down is likely down on themselves.
“But it’s okay for me to make fun of myself,” you might say. On the contrary, making fun of your own weaknesses minimizes what you are going through and says to other people dealing with that same disorder that their problems aren’t as big as they feel they are. This perpetuates the stigma of mental illness and thus the need to get help when you are experiencing symptoms.
Please, think really hard about your propensity to make jokes about anyone’s illness, particularly mental illness. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in the United States and the rates are continuing to rise. What might seem like a harmless joke to you will have a ripple effect and become very damaging to someone on the other end of the joke.
Bethany Marinelli is an author and speaker out of Orlando, Florida. She also supports her husband, Andrew, in his auto repair business and homeschools her son, Arthur.
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