Growing out of it
It won’t surprise you to learn that as an Extremely Sad Teenager I listened to a lot of three-piece bands. Soundgarden, Portishead, Nirvana, Placebo. My bedroom was covered, floor to ceiling, with posters I had torn from Rolling Stone and TV Hits. I was into moody bass lines and wailing bridges and lead singers who sounded like someone had stolen their favourite jumper.
In their lyrics I found something I couldn’t find elsewhere: empathy. I felt I didn’t know anyone else like me — obviously not true, but in those days we didn’t talk about anything remotely serious or embarrassing, even though so many of us were experiencing it. Music became a way to connect to an external person who knew what I meant and wouldn’t — in fact, couldn’t — judge me for it. Outside of actual fanbases, it was a sort of meta, disconnected community that let me cry alone but not alone.
There’s some science behind this. We’re more likely to turn to media, including music, when we’re in a negative mood, and that emotional dependency on music also increases during periods of depression.
It turns out it’s not really that good for us — research has shown that relying on music for comfort can make a young person feel worse. A 2015 study found that ‘having high levels of distress while listening to music was associated with more intense, negative moods afterward.’
But it felt good. Before I was old enough to articulate my feelings, the lyrics these people wrote did the work for me. The music was simultaneously a substitute for and a representation of the confused jumble that was my brain.
Silverchair was my first ‘real’ concert — no parents, an actual mosh pit, sweaty older guys — in December of 1997, when I was fifteen. I went with my best friend, and when lead singer Daniel Johns appeared on stage I screamed until my eyes exploded out of my head and landed on the person in front of me. Or so I recall.
Earlier that year I had bought my first Silverchair album from a second-hand record shop in the south of France. A perfect allegory, in a way — the intolerable privilege of my misery. First, I sat in the Renault we had rented to drive from Paris to Rome and listened to REM’s Everybody Hurts. In the sky above, Hale Bop blazed its stardust path and that was part of it, too, people killing themselves in search of something better. No one came to check on me in the car, sixteen thousand kilometres from home. I ate bread and cheese in the shadow of celebrities’ superyachts in St Tropez and wondered, at night, if anyone would miss me when I died.
It weighed so, so heavily on me then, when I was fourteen.
The trouble was, that’s what people had told me it would be like to be fourteen. They had said, being a teenager is a nightmare. Teenagers are a nightmare. They go through all these phases like ‘liking girls’ and ‘being depressed’, and then a few years go by and they are, one presumes, magically resolved of them.
Hormones are terrifying and they make terrifying things happen to us, of course. But I wasn’t sitting in a tiny rented car looking over the Mediterranean fucking Sea and wondering if I could slit my wrists with a pâté knife because I was a teenager. I was doing it because I had clinical depression.
So, I bought the Silverchair album Freak Show from this record shop in Saint-Maxime. I suppose it was forty francs or something. I had a pewter Discman and I slipped the CD inside. We were staying in a stone villa on a painfully green hillside, the kind of green you squeezed from a tube. We sat at a wrought iron table that Mum had covered in oozing cheese and ripe figs and bread you could smell from a distance. I thought, look at this place, this dreamscape. How can I be here and also be so sad?
I didn’t taste the cheese. I listened to the music and in my mind it formed the shapes of the feelings I was having. The band I loved gave me words to describe how I was evolving as a person, when I was fourteen.
Need a pathway / need a guide / contemplating suicide /
wish I could be like you / you say you care but do you?
From my holiday in the south of France I remember these things: buying a mint green Quiksilver t-shirt; masturbating in a claw-foot bath; watching a fisherman turn an octopus inside-out; and crying about wanting to kill myself.
Now, if you were planning to write a hit piece on me, obviously you should include this. Poor Anna. Her European holiday was so hard she couldn’t even be bothered to stay alive for all of it. I spent the weeks ignoring buzzing amphitheatres and breathtaking art galleries with my head in books, complaining that my feet hurt and I missed my friends. I was so sad on that trip that when we visited St Peter’s Basilica I, teenaged atheist, prayed for peace to flow through me. But I wasn’t only a wanker. It was genuine peril, a similarly timeless thing. Existential and ancient.
Even this way of expressing it has an immature filter. A grand and impenetrable woe.
We position teenagers as a temporary whorl of angst. That is true for some, of course, but for others, this period brings the debut of lifelong symptoms, which are immediately undermined by the people to whom we look for guidance. Possibly I’m in arrested development and have never moved beyond shrieking ‘no one understands me!!!’ in public places, but an even more likely explanation is that mental illness often begins in adolescence.
There’s no denying that being a teenager is a fucking disaster. There’s so much B.O. and you have to get changed in front of other teenagers and someone told the guy you like’s friend that you like him and now they’re prank-calling your house and your brother is teasing you about it fuck.
But also.
The median age of onset for anxiety disorders is 11. A surge of adrenalin tells your body to RUN QUICKLY RUN YOU’RE GONNA DIE, and you’re not even old enough to watch an M-rated movie on your own.
Also.
Half of all the mental health conditions we experience at some point in our lives will have started by the time we turn 14.
And.
One more thing.
The leading cause of death in Australians aged 15–24 is suicide.
Daniel Johns has, in his reserved sort of way, been quite open about mental illness. On Silverchair’s 1999 album Neon Ballroom (can it really be so long ago?) was ‘Ana’s Song’, which, for a fangirl named Anna, included some fairly confronting lyrics:
🎶 Please die Ana 🎶
That year, Johns announced he had anorexia nervosa (the titular ‘Ana’), a condition he says ‘nearly left him dead’.
In 2004, Johns appeared for the first time with Australian interviewer extraordinaire, Andrew Denton, a man who can extract the deeply personal from almost anyone. Within the first two minutes, Denton asks Johns: ‘… when you were a kid, you had an imaginary friend called Robin, who you could see, is that right?’ Johns goes, ‘I think my parents took me to some doctors because they thought I was loco … he was real … I could touch him, feel him, I took him to school.’ And they’re laughing. ‘It was never a negative thing, [my parents] just thought they had a crazy son.’
For anyone who’s ever experienced anxiety, his body language is familiar. Five minutes in, he has drunk all his water and some of Denton’s, and starts fanning himself with his hat. ‘Are you okay?’ Denton says — and again, he’s joking, but somehow also not, watching the anxiety unfurl. ‘I keep checking my glass,’ says Johns. ‘I think it might be a nervous twitch.’
In that interview, Johns detailed the psychological aspect of his illness, the paranoia: ‘I could somehow convince myself that apples contained razorblades, and wouldn’t go to restaurants because I thought every chef in the world wanted to poison me.’ He had, he revealed, been close to suicide. ‘You’re scared the whole time … it’s not fear that’s going to cure you, because it’s kind of what starts it.’
I was twenty-one then, newly married. I had a little baby and another one on the way, and every day the panic and sadness still gripped me. I felt ridiculous; I had been taught to think of depression and anxiety as juvenilia. A person would outgrow these feelings. One day, they would be mature enough to get a job and a yearly train ticket and the bad feelings would simply fall away.
Was it a uniquely 90s problem to be told your emerging depression was an issue of pop culture? Of course not; our parents’ parents told them to stop moping over Fleetwood Mac, and our older cousins were balls deep in the existential crises of The Smiths and The Cure and The The. Art has always been a way to find sense in the abstract. Music, poetry, light installations, silversmithing … all are ways to express very hard feelings without stating them explicitly. Being able to defer the articulation to a third party. We don’t always know what the feelings are until someone else says the words to describe them. And then they’re not our words, so we don’t have to take ownership of them. We can borrow them for as long as we need to.
The social media-era version might be sharing memes about mental illness.
As memes do, they appropriate existing pop culture, drawing on what we already have in common (TV shows, fandoms, previous memes) and often combining them with topics far more serious. They’re of the moment, zeitgeisty, topical. They’re intertextual — revising and mimicking other memes to create new meaning, often in a way that requires the recipient to have seen every other meme in history. Leaving the internet for one hour can mean never truly understanding future memes.
I realise I sound like my grandmother trying to explain memes to the people on her council’s excursion minibus and for that I am sorry.
Mental illness memes take the usual internet meme format and make a joke about how shit it is sometimes to be inside a brain. They might highlight a symptom or experience, usually with cynicism or satire, for laughs. Instead of being self-centred like motivational quotes, they face outward. Implied in the meme is ‘I know you understand’. Even the way lazy aggregator websites write headlines for these memes is telling: 30 Memes That Might Make You Laugh If You Live With a Mental Illness, 21 Depression Memes that May Make You Feel a Little Better.
Here’s an example:
I laughed out loud the first time I saw this. Why?
A 2020 study looked at how depressed people perceived internet memes compared to non-depressed people and found that people currently experiencing symptoms of depression were disproportionately likely to find these memes significantly more humorous and shareable. ‘Specifically, by potentially facilitating: a humorous take on a negative experience and situation; the perception of peer-support through affiliation with others experiencing similar symptoms.’ In a digital environment, community is the reason the sharing platform exists — in a sense, it’s built for this. The content is designed to be distributed. It’s intended to reduce the isolation that has, for so long, come with having mental illness.
Therefore, by sharing and observing depressive memes, depressed individuals may theoretically form social and emotional bonds with others which may be perceived as socially supportive.
I conducted a very unscientific survey about this, in the heartland of the mental illness meme, Twitter. Now, admittedly, there’s a good chance I attract a higher than usual proportion of people who a) have mental illness, and b) laugh at memes. But when asked if they found these memes funny, 74.7% of people with mental illness said they did. And 83.9% said mental illness memes helped them feel connected to others. (You can tell this is a little scientific because my figures have decimal places.)
The question of why is more difficult to answer. When I was a teenager facing life with mental illness, I was certain no one else could understand my experience. It was incredibly isolating to sit in a classroom with people I perceived as living entirely sane and happy lives while I was thinking about dying. Mental illness is an extraordinarily isolating experience, manifested from inside our minds and largely invisible. So, one answer is: it helps us realise we’re not alone.
Recognising yourself can be cathartic, too. Mental illness can have the sense of an existential threat, and one that diminishes us, makes us incomplete. We might feel less than because we are depressed, anxious, delusional, paranoid. Memes reflect our humanity. So, another answer is: I’m human.
Jokes work when they ‘punch up’, right? It’s not funny when a hedge fund manager makes a crack about kids flipping burgers. Historically, people with mental illness have had limited opportunity to speak for themselves; serious mental illness and its symptoms have been used as punchlines by people who have no personal experience, while those being mocked have had no right of reply. The mental illness meme creates a level playing field: anyone with an internet connection can share one.
Self-deprecation is a common theme, and perhaps this contributes to a sense of community. In the same way as a teenager listening to garage bands, we’re in on the joke. Only I can say that about myself. Don’t punch down. The gallows humour must come from inside the house.
The study I mentioned earlier argues that memes ‘visualise the experience … which for many may be difficult to verbalise.’ They provide a mental illness shorthand: conveying the hard feelings without the threat of articulation. When we share one of these memes, there’s an implication that we relate to it. We can connect without being required to expose more of ourselves than we are prepared to. These are genuinely serious mental illness texts, communicating impossibly hard experiences in a kind of metalanguage. They describe the language of mental illness through multiple interacting media, rife with subtext and cultural references, and with humour, openly and willingly. Ha ha, yeah, I’m fucking depressed! And so are all of you!
So, maybe, they represent something even less precise, something that exists across all artforms: that a life with mental illness is still a life.
When Andrew Denton interviewed Daniel Johns again in 2018 — the latter’s first interview in three years — we were all grown adults. Middle-aged, even. Our teenaged selves had been lost to the same sad grime as grunge, flannos and Video Hits. Except for one thing: the illness had come with us.
I watched the interview, because I still harbour some belief that we are soulmates and he will be able to sense me through the television, and recognition struck me right in the bones. He appears nervous from the outset. Minimal contact. Shifting in his seat. He also appears happy to be there, too, which was something else I recognised. He doesn’t seem resentful of being asked or desperate to leave, just anxious. It’s obvious he likes Denton. But also, he seems optimistic about what’s happening in his life, because you can have a mental illness and not want to stand on the edge of a cliff all of the time.
Then there’s a moment when he takes a quick look at his hands before responding, and they appear to be shaking, just a little. I, insanely, began to read his mind: How am I going? Check for signs. Put it away. Keep it together. I played it back a few more times. I watched this successful, creative, grown adult show my own anxiety symptoms on national telly in front of a live audience. I was reminded that, when I was listening to that CD two decades ago, the anxious and sad feelings I was having were real.
Afterwards, my friend and excellent music writer, Andrew P Street, wrote about the interview for GOAT. It wasn’t, he suggested, a fun gossip about Silverchair or Johns’ marriage to singer Natalie Imbruglia, but something much more revealing.
Daniel “Him Out Of Silverchair” Johns, has the air of someone who has done more therapy than they’re comfortable with and will never say anything unguarded again. … He was fidgety, he was visibly nervous, and every answer was preceded by a long, thoughtful pause. And as the interview progressed, we understood why. … In fact, Johns was giving a masterclass in what someone with crippling anxiety looks like when they’re successfully holding it together in public.
Ways to understand mental illness exist in so many of these old songs and the people who wrote them. Of the musicians I loved then — still love, for their companionship and time travel — many died ‘too early’, as they say. Their mental illness, however it manifested, wasn’t for the sake of lyricism or to sell tour merch. It wasn’t just for the 90s (well, Kurt’s was, but you know).
To suicide we’ve lost Cobain, Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington, Prodigy’s Keith Flint, Doug Hopkins of The Gin Blossoms. Two lead singers of the Stone Temple Pilots suicided (Bennington was one, Scott Weiland the other). Countless others have died with substance use disorders: Layne Staley and Mike Starr, both from Alice in Chains, Kristen Pfaff of Hole, Paul Gray from Slipknot, Mikey Welsh of Weezer (a couple of side-steps out of grunge there, but even so).
In 2017, Cornell suicided an hour after performing with Soundgarden in Detroit; a Billboard review of the show reported that he had been ‘in fine form and spirits’. Cornell had mentioned depression in various ways throughout his career. In a 1996 interview with Robyn Doreian, he said, ‘I know what it feels like to be suicidal, and I know what it feels like to be hopeless.’ In 1999, he told NYROCK that depression can be ‘very inspiring. At least for me it can be. The quiet aspects of life are very important, because let’s face it, life is pretty difficult.’
At other times, he talked about doing better, and the happiness he had found with his wife and children:
I’ve gone through some pretty dark periods, some of it self-imposed, some of it losing close friends and people that I miss. Now is something … and I never really even knew that this was a way that life can be like.
After Cornell died, music journo Mike Zimmerman remembered and then resurfaced an interview with him from years earlier. ‘He and I talked about suicide,’ Zimmerman recalls. ‘We talked about depression. We talked about the body count from the grunge era …’ Cornell had told Zimmerman: ‘I was depressed for a long time. If you’re depressed long enough, it’s almost a comfort, a state of mind that you’ve made peace with because you’ve been in it so long.’
Soundgarden had a song about suicide and depression for almost every low mood. Cornell’s lyrics were beautiful, in the grunge way (which was: overt misery as explicit poetry), but they were clear. The band’s discography is riddled with suicidal ideation:
‘Burden In My Hand’ (Kill your health and kill yourself / And kill everything you love / And if you live you can fall to pieces / And suffer with my ghost)
‘Pretty Noose’ (Common ruse dirty face / Pretty noose is pretty hate / And I don’t like what you got me hanging from)
‘Like Suicide’ (Bit down on the bullet now / I had a taste so sour / I had to think of something sweet / Love’s like suicide).
Chris Cornell himself shut down this line of interrogation in a Rolling Stone interview in 1994: ‘It’s a morbid exchange when somebody who is a writer like that [Andrew Wood, a fellow musician and friend] dies, and then everyone starts picking through all their lyrics.’
Obviously, that’s exactly what I’m doing here. Looking for evidence that the words meant the same thing to these musicians as they did to me, of forewarning and camaraderie. But, of course, not everyone who wrote a depressing song in their 20s became a clinically unwell adult.
Still, they gave us a way to feel understood, even if it was only in our imagination.
Ten years after my meltdown in the Renault, I went to my last Silverchair concert: their Across the Great Divide tour. By then I had left my husband and was in the grip of some of the best and worst days of my life. Getting divorced — looking for myself again — gave me a reason to dwell in nostalgia.
When the old songs played, I felt in my body the way I had the first time I had heard them, the ninth and fiftieth times; but with the absence of teenage naivety and the heavy load of hopelessness. I swayed and sang along at Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena and it had never left me. It wasn’t a phase or a symptom of too much Jeff Buckley. I was twenty-four years old and I felt exactly the same, grateful to someone else for finding the right words.
I suppose it was impossible to tell the difference between what my parents saw as a sort of acute teenagehood and an actual illness brewing. I can’t blame them for imagining — hoping? — I would ‘grow out of it’. That anxiety and depression were illnesses of immaturity, and that ahead of me was an inevitable self-actualisation through which I would stop listening to You Am I and Alice in Chains and instead buy rosé and wait for the Cash Cow to call.
