A relative of mine posted this joke on facebook this morning..."I wish my lawn were manic depressive so it would cut itself."

I am so upset, I am horrified, I am hurt. I sent her a private email simply stating I don't think her comment is funny and that I work so hard in my personal and professional life to erase the stigma of mental illness. I almost cried when I saw that people had responded to her comment with LOL and "good one". I am going to try and not let this ruin my day.

Some people will never get it Hydra... sorry she hurt your feelings


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ooph, that's not funny. It is good that you PM'd her and just explained that it hurt, more often than not, it's just ignorance. Feel better!

Stupid and in terribly bad taste! I hope she finally "gets it" about mental illness and deletes her entry.

I work in a school district and have a child in middle school. There are several kids who are cutting and hurting themselves. That joke was made in poor taste - I hope it was just an oversight on her part.

Thanks Ladies. Your support is awesome and most welcome. I stayed on track today which is an accomplishment because when I am upset I tend to overeat. I am having a nice relaxing evening playing on the pc and talking on the phone.

This is actually a pretty common joke...Though usually the joke is, "I wish my lawn was emo so it would cut itself." It's all over the internet, and has been for years, and so I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't take you seriously when you messaged her. I'm sorry it was a trigger for you; hopefully you can avoid seeing it other places.

what she said. I wouldn't take it to heart, although changing the words of the quote to aim it towards you was uncalled for.

and it is said kids joke about cutting themselves these days. can go into a lot of things with that...but will just leave it at "it's sad"

That's not really a funny comment, I agree- I worked with mentally ill people for almost 5 years an advocate- and the more people turn them into the butt of jokes, the less respect they are given. Good for you for making your thoughts known. I hope everyone is as strong as you.

And yes, the joke does go "I wish my lawn was emo so it would cut itself".

I have never seen it done as "manic depressive" and it makes me wonder if the words were changed. Very wrong anyways !

Thanks for the support, I was upset but not anymore. People will make humor out of just about anything. This person did apologize to me and we just agree to disagree about this whole thing.

It is not funny at all.

One thing to think about with facebook though is that there's a thing called "status shuffle" so if people have that application added on, it puts a random witty (most of the time stupid) comment in where their status goes. Maybe your relative didn't actually put the comment on.

People are who they are and as a whole we are too sensitive to what other people say. If you want to educate this family member, do it but don't expect her to change who she is just to suit your needs. Just practice a little tolerance for someone less educated/experienced as you, use it as an educating moment and move on.

My impression of it is that she heard the joke somewhere, but forgot how it went and screwed it up horribly. Manic Depressive isn't even a current term, it's now been replaced with Bipolar. But it's Borderline Personality Disorder that usually involves self harm behaviors (there's a high comorbidity rate but still, at least get it right) Personally I did find the joke funny the first time I heard it, (when it was phrased as emo, and it was about 5 years ago) but I have a bit of a different perspective on it. I'm in nursing and have dealt with a lot of persons with mental health issues. Emo has made being borderline seem cool to a lot of kids and I'd say that more than half of the kids I see that cut don't meet enough criteria to be diagnosed as anything but "teenager", so that's why I find emo jokes funny. Not because it makes fun of people with mental health issues, but because it makes fun of kids who pretend to have mental health issues because they think its cool. So the emo lawn joke and others like "How do you get an emo kid out of a tree? Cut the rope." really have nothing to do with mental illness to me. It's about kids who don't have don't have a clue pretending to be something they're not and wouldn't want to be.

Yes, most people do not know. Some of them don't really care. But don't let that ruin your day. You can use that as a complaint against them. Hopefully the admins would take that message down.