Dear XO Jane,
I used to be an avid reader, and frequent defender, of your site. Sure, it’s filled with click-baity headlines, but I would always argue that it was so the stories you featured would be read; that these women’s voices would be heard by the widest audience possible. In fact, I considered pitching my own story to you many times, knowing that there would be readers in your vast audience who would be helped by reading my account.
After today, I am so grateful I didn’t. Your article “My Former Friend’s Death Was A Blessing” was upsetting, chilling, and downright dangerous. I am glad that my own words will never be associated with such an irresponsible editorial board.
You see, I could have been that friend. I have gone through some exceptionally difficult times, and felt so emotionally low that I once would have welcomed death as an alternative to life as it was. I’m sure that long-lost friends would have viewed my social media feeds and found my life to be, as your writer put it, “tragic”. They’ve been filled with depressive musings and accounts of abuse. Like Leah, I’ve lost people who mean the world to me, including a dear friend in high school and my father shortly after I graduated college. Bipolar disorder had at one point “robbed” me of “reaching [my] potential”. I’ve been “alone and terribly unhappy”. An outsider, or a friend who cared as little for me as this writer did for her “former friend”, would have wondered why I hadn’t been involuntarily admitted to a psych hospital years ago. I’m sure that my own posts often bounced between boastful posts made in a desperate attempt to make my life seem better than it was and “word salads” or posts that showed that I was “suffering and clearly ill”.
Had I read this story before overcoming some of those mental health challenges I’m positive it would have been enough to convince me that death was a welcome answer to the many problems living while mentally ill posed. After all, I too was suffering; I too was “so sick” I felt like I was “beyond help”; I too was going through some tragic circumstances. Just like Leah, my family is also spread out across the country, and the health care system is simply too strained to provide the care I needed at the time. Had I known that there was someone out there who would have viewed my “inevitable” death as a “blessing”, I’m positive it would have been enough to make me see it the same way.
If there’s one positive thing this article did it was to make me even more grateful that I had people in my life who saw me as more than just “unnecessary negative energy” and who responded to my alarming posts with care and concern rather than selfish scorn.
That one redeeming aspect does little to help me justify reading your site any longer, and I know that I’m not alone. Even your former contributors have united against you. Your readership is vast, and surely, based on other content you provide, you must be aware that many of them suffer from their own mental health challenges. To publish such a piece during Mental Health Awareness Month and without including a resource for those who may believe that their deaths would also be a “blessing”, was completely and utterly irresponsible.
While I see that you’ve apologized for publishing such a dangerous piece, your generically worded brief post and vague promises to review your vetting process do little to encourage me to visit your site again, or to pitch to you at all in the future. Any level of review at all would have come up with the obvious conclusion that this piece perpetuates stigma and could actually encourage your mentally ill readers to harm themselves. It seems that your critics were right and you do value clicks over content.
I hope that you have learned something from this experience, and that you do more to help the mentally ill as a result. Stigma kills, and calling the death of the mentally ill, or anyone, a “blessing” only makes matters worse. You need to do better. Your readers, and writers, deserve better.
Ashley
If you are in need of help, or want someone to speak with about your mental illness, you can contact any one of these hotlines, listed by country. You are worth while, you are valuable, and there is help out there.