Depression, Anxiety, And Social Media

What are anxiety and depression? Anxiety is a nervous disorder which can cause the feeling of overwhelming uneasiness and apprehension. While depression is a medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think,and how you act. Depression creates the feelings of sadness and a loss of interest in activities once enjoyed. Also, it can lead to a multitude of emotional and physical problems that can decrease a person’s ability to function in performing their everyday life. Anxiety and depression affect a combined 56. 2 million adults in the United States. One of the people affected by affected by depression and anxiety is Demetrius Harmon. Demetrius was born and raised in Michigan, where he began to become more involved in social media while a freshman in high school. Demetrius Harmon first got a social media following on the once popular app Vine, under the screen name of MeechOnMars. Since then he has been active on other social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Demetrius has been very open about his struggles with anxiety and depression, and currently uses his social media following to educate and inspire his followers or viewers that might also be going through the same problems he has.

Demetrius posted this poem he wrote on his Instagram which has over 1 million followers. He states this was his suicide note from a year ago, and he states the claim “it gets better,” he states this to inform people of his past and the challenges he has had to deal with. He uses his past and current experiences to evoke emotion in the reader, this can also be described as pathos. The pathos that is seen in this post is used to educate those specific people that might also be suffering. He creates this feeling by talking about his past problems and showing how he has used his specific problems to turn it into a positive. The caption that is posted with the picture creates an overall tone of sadness, but the caption also has a tone of inspiration. In this personal story he writes about his clothing brand that is now more than just a clothing brand. His story may convince or inspire someone that might be going through the same thing to better themselves like he has.

Another example of Demetrius using social media to educate and provide advice on depression and anxiety is on this YouTube channel. His channel has about 430 thousand subscribers and is titled MeechOnMars (recently changed to Demetrius Harmon). In this specific video Demetrius talks once again about his personal struggles. He mainly focuses on how because he is a male when he cries or feels the need to express himself in ways such as crying, stereotypes set by the society we live in could make him seem weak. Another aspect he focuses on is how this is especially harder for him because of his skin tone. In this video he talks about the before mentioned personal stories he has and how crying has helped him. He states that crying is a good way to release your personal feelings and get out some negative energy that you might be feeling. He once again uses pathos to convey his point in this social media post by talking about his personal struggles. However, compared to his other post the comments on his video are still mainly positive, but there are more negative comments, which were very hard to come across on his other social media posts.

The platform he is more vocal on is Twitter, which has amounted over 1 million followers. In this post and video he talks about what he does in order to better himself. In the attached video to the post he talks about how he makes short videos and posts them on Twitter under the hashtag “todaywillbeabetterday”. He does this to get anything he might be feeling off his chest and into the world as he is feeling it. Also in the post he encourages other people to use the hashtag and share their own personal stories and what they might be feeling at the time of recording and posting it. He once again uses pathos to inspire those that might be viewing the post. He creates this inspiring tone by talking about how this method has helped him and how this particular method might help others. He can inspire those viewing the post to create their own post in the hopes of having a community of people there to be there for them and having their back in a time of need. This specific post has very positive comments all throughout it and also has a decent amount of likes that go along with it.

Overall, Demetrius does a good job of educating people on the topic of mental health, specifically depression and anxiety. However, he uses mostly if not only pathos. In order for him to have more effective posts he needs to use more ethos and logos. On the other hand, he is not an organization or company solely dedicated to the cause of education on mental health. He does have effective social media posts that educate people but there is room for improvement. If you look at the engagement from followers on the posts, people are active and show their appreciation for him and what he is doing for the online community he has created. Once again Demetrius Harmon does a good job of connecting with followers, educating those followers, and providing ways to help those followers when in hard times, which creates an effective social media.