Mental Health Awareness Week is drawing to a close and I’m left wondering how quickly this year’s message – be kind – will be forgotten.
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There are some lovely lockdown stories about people fetching food for elderly neighbours, leaving free books outside for people to take and raising money for NHS charities. Long may this continue.
But I’m not certain that it will. How many of us will remember to be kind when we return to a ‘normal’ life when everyone can go out to the shops or visit friends and relatives? Will we remember the period of time when we stayed at home in order to protect each other from the virus?
One specific area that needs to remind itself about kindness is social media. There are days when I have to avoid Twitter entirely to save myself from going completely mad. There is so much negativity and trash-talking that it’s enough to drag you down into a pit of misery.
What really gets me is those people who do not practise what they preach. They urge others to be kind, to say nice things to each other and be mindful of the fact that someone may be having a bad day and saying something nasty will make them may make them feel worse. But recently I had to unfollow one of those people for a sickening display of hypocrisy. Someone had written an article she disagreed with and she responded by calling the person ‘scum’. No other context, no explanation, just that one word. What would she have said if someone did that to her?
I try to be kind. I don’t always manage it, but I always try to ask myself how I would feel if someone reacted to me in that way. There are often times when I’ll start to write a tweet in anger and then ask myself if it’s even worth it. It’s hard not to retaliate when someone is mean about you, or someone you care about, but usually it just hurts you to hang onto that feeling.
The danger with social media is that you’re a step removed from people. It would be a lot harder to walk up to the person and say what you’ve said in a tweet to their face. You may even think twice before saying it. Remember, just as there’s a person behind what you tweet, there’s a person behind the tweets you read.
One thing I hope people take away from Mental Health Awareness Week is something that a friend said to me (paraphrasing a well-known slogan from Dogs Trust), kindness is for life, not just a week. It’s all about paying it forward and you never know when you might need kindness from someone else.