Depression frequently occurs to public figures such as celebrities as actors, singers, and k-pop idols. As time has passed, people are starting to gain more awareness towards depression, and how it is a severe problem existing in the current society. However, in the status quo, malingering depression has become a trend among teens and individuals who are in their early 20s that has caused addiction.

The definition of malingering depression is when an individual is fabricating symptoms of depression. Malingering depression appears most on social media where teens upload videos and photos. Teens who follow the trend of malingering depression would upload various posts such as captions that imply that they are depressed. In extreme cases, these individuals even upload photos of self-harm where they would make cuts in their wrists with a box cutter. It is easy to get addicted to Malingering depression because most individuals who have malingering depression want attention since in a way they are showing off that they have depression when they actually don’t. Furthermore, it is undeniable that people care about you more when you are going through mental illnesses such as depression because they are worried about you, and want you to get well soon. When the individual gets attention, it turns into addiction because when people who crave attention start getting attention, they would want more which means that it would turn into a vicious cycle.

Malingering depression can result in people eventually having depression when individuals get addicted to it. When people get into the habit of emerging themselves into depression, they would start showing signs of depression. The main problem of this is that people who have malingering depression wouldn’t acknowledge that they have depression since they are used to pretending that they have depression. This means that when individuals malinger depression, it would increase the likelihood for them to get depression and never realize that they have depression.

Additionally, due to the new trend of malingering depression, in the long term, people would start to hold the assumption of how everyone who shows the sign of depression has malingering depression. This mostly harms the individuals who really have depression because everyone would assume that they are faking depression just for attention, and not think of the problem seriously. Even though malingering depression can spread awareness about depression, malingering depression is harmful because it would only spread negative messages about depression, and would villainize individuals who are suffering from depression. 

Furthermore, it can influence others to follow the trend of malingering depression. When this happens, all the harms such as people eventually getting depressed and spreading a negative idea of depression would increase since a lot of people would want to follow the trend. It’s most likely that many teens would follow this trend because mangling depression would mostly show up on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. This is most harmful to teens because compared to adults, they are naive and imprudent which means that most teens won’t care about the harms that may occur by participating in the trend of malingering depression. If this continues, it will cause many teens to get depression, and from the teens who need help, most of them won’t get help because they would assume that they’re just following the trend and there’s nothing wrong with it.

Instead of people making depression a trend, they should start spreading awareness about the problem. Spreading awareness is a better solution to the problem because it doesn’t create the idea that having depression is “cool” additionally, it helps convey how serious depression is. Spreading information about the severity of depression is better compared to creating a trend based on depression because it would prevent depression being treated as a silly act among the teens.