Mentally ill individuals have undergone a long history of stigmatization. This stigmatization has affected mentally ill individuals' own understanding of themselves, primarily due to the inaccurate, normalized and glorified representations in the media (Wedding, pg. 3). Representation has serious implications for the people situated in this community, especially when they are depicted negatively in the media and viewed by the rest of society as ‘dangerous’ or ‘unpredictable’.

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However, we do need to recognize that there have been many efforts taken by filmmakers and people within the filmmaking community in order to represent the mentally ill community in the best, most honest way. These films are rewarded for their impressive accuracy and recognized by programs and organizations such as the annual Golden Psi Media Award. This award, for example, recognizes book, television and film writers that respectfully and accurately portray individuals with mental illness conditions (Clyman, 2011).

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There are still many examples of media, specifically within films, that simplify, glorify or use mental illnesses as a scapegoat to excuse violent behavior by characters, which inaccurately represents real-life people battling these illnesses. What happens when these representations are given a new life, and are remixed into Graphics Interchange Format (GIFs), for example, and shared on online communities such as Tumblr?

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As an aspiring filmmaker with a personal history of mental illness, I was drawn towards studying this topic. Growing up, I was confused by what it meant to be someone with a mental illness. I had learned about the so-called warning signs, or symptoms, of being depressed or bipolar, but there wasn’t much information readily available to me about how mental illnesses would shape my personality and everyday life. Being born into Generation Z where the main line of communication was the internet, I looked for a way to identify with myself and my mental illnesses on streaming platforms like Netflix, and internet blogging sites like Tumblr.

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I joined Tumblr in 2011 but became an avid, everyday user in 2015. This also happened to be a pivotal time in my adolescent and teen years, as I was roughly 16 years old. When I began this research project, I decided to investigate whether there was a difference in the sort of content I was reblogging, saving or liking starting in 2015, so I utilized Tumblr’s “mass post editor” tool to see. I found that from roughly November of 2015 to now, I began reblogging content (GIFs, images with text, quotes, etc.) related to “happiness” or “sadness”. This timing directly aligns with when I experienced an increase in everyday symptoms related to my struggle with depression and bipolar disorder. Thus, I turned to Tumblr more and more to understand, or even as an attempt to “fit in” with a subculture that was situated in and around media texts that highlighted mental illness topics. However, I began to feel one of two things based on what I was watching and reading: Either it was cool, or trending, to be mentally ill, or that there was something intrinsically wrong with me. Now, with a much deeper understanding of what it means to be mentally ill and an undergraduate college career of studying media and film production, I am dedicated to joining the conversation regarding the representation of mentally ill individuals in films. That being said, I believe that I bring a unique slant and accessibility to this research topic. This paper fills gaps in the literature by specifically examining and reflecting upon the transmedial texts that travel from films to Tumblr, or vice versa, that are situated within the mentally ill community.

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Through an extensive research project and multiple film analyses, this paper aims to add to the already existent conversation surrounding representations of mental illnesses in motion-pictures, how GIF content is chosen and shared from these films to Tumblr, as well as offer new contributions to the conversation surrounding the mentally ill community present on Tumblr. Previous research has looked at mental illness in the social media world, as well as representations of mental illness in film, but it has not yet tackled what it means to translate a representation of mental illness from a film, into a GIF, and onto a social networking site such as Tumblr, where it then joins the online, mentally ill community. The films I’ve chosen to analyze are based on the most frequently shared and popular GIFs that derived their content from the films. Due to the fact that there are nearly three hundred identifiable mental illnesses in the latest version of the ​Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, I​ will focus on specifically those GIFs and films that represent or reflect on depression and the risk-behaviors that accompany that illness. In order to understand the substantial impact that this transmediation, or translation of work into another medium, from film to GIF, or vice versa, has on individuals, we must first look at the history and influence of films and social media, and even more specifically, their representation of mental illnesses.