Sadfishing and the Curious Permutations of Online Depression
As y’all may have noticed I use this blog to document my fierce lifelong struggle with Depression, Anxiety and other forms of mental illness. I do that for a couple of reasons.
I like to think of this blog as a rigorously honest chronicle of my existence. Right now I am experiencing one of the longest and most intense depressions of my adult life. It’s so overwhelming that it honestly feels like it might never end and instead will be my new normal.
I also write extensively about depression because I know that a lot of other people struggle with it the way that I do and will derive some comfort from knowing that they are not alone.
That’s one of the awful things about depression: it’s an inherently lonely and alienating condition that separates you from the people and things that you love and makes you feel like you are alone in a vast, cruel and incomprehensible world.
I also write about depression because it’s cathartic. Writing is how I understand myself and the world so writing about depression helps me cope with something that has dogged me for as long as I can remember.
Because I write consistently about depression, being hopelessly in debt and struggling financially and professionally one of my friends messaged me to ask if I was doing okay.
I was going to write that I wasn’t doing okay, and was struggling mightily and also that I wouldn’t write about being depressed and broke unless I was depressed and broke.
I couldn’t imagine why anyone would lie about being depressed or struggling with mental illness. Then, as I sometimes do, I took to Google to ascertain whether or not I was right.
As is often the case, I was wrong! I learned then of a curious practice known as safishing. Like catfishing and blackfishing sadfishing is a form of purposeful online deception.
But where catfishing refers to people pretending to be other people online for various purposes and blackfishers make themselves look darker and more ethnic online as a way of denying their fundamental whiteness sadfishing is the term for people who “exaggerate their emotional state online to generate sympathy” according to an article archived in National Library of Medicine.
I’m not sure why I assumed that nobody would profess to be depressed, suicidal or filled with anxiety unless that was true because sadfishing isn’t terribly dissimilar from Munchausen by Proxy.
In both cases people pretend to have harder, more difficult lives than they actually do as a way of making people feel sorry for them.
The wonderful and horrible thing about the internet is that you can be whoever the hell you want to be as opposed to who you actually are. In other words you can lie flagrantly to try to get people to feel the way you want them to feel.
In catfishing, online liars generally profess to be far more attractive, successful, younger and more exciting than they actually are in order to attract a partner.
On dating sites people often stretch the truth to make themselves seem like a better catch. They’ll post a photograph of themselves looking thinner, younger and more desirable than they actually are.
A reverse dynamic is at play with sadfishing. The idea behind sadfishing is to make yourself seem as sad, depressed and despondent as possible so that people will feel for you.
It’s a way of courting compassion. Everyone seemingly deals with depression on some level. It’s part of the human condition and also an inevitable byproduct of capitalism.
For sadfishers, however, it’s not enough to be legitimately depressed. Instead they feel the need to be dramatically, performatively depressed in a way that will generate sympathy the same way that having, or professing to have a sick child does.
From that perspective sadfishing makes sense. I can assure you, however, dear reader, that I am being honest and forthright when discussing my mental health because there is honestly nothing to be gained from doing so.
It’s not as if when I write about being depressed and broke readers buy my books or pledge my Patreon page or subscribe to my Substack newsletter out of concern and sympathy. If anything the opposite dynamic seems to be at play. Writing regularly about depression and financial anxiety seems to push people away and make me seem needy, sad and more than a little desperate.
Who would want to read the website of someone like that?
There is nothing to be gained financially or professionally by extensively chronicling my inner battles for public consumption but emotionally I do want people to feel for me. I want them to feel my pain. I want people to have compassion for me and my struggles.
That, ultimately, is the final reason that I write about the demons inside my brain: I have to. I don’t really have a choice. I need to get it all out on the page so that it does not eat me up inside. I need to let the monsters out so that they don’t destroy me.
So I understand the concept of sadfishing. Now I know that people do exaggerate what they’re going through and I know why. But rather than judge these people harshly I’m going to try to have compassion for them despite their fundamental dishonesty.
After all, not everyone is lucky enough to genuinely experience intense, lifelong depression but there are some strange, misguided souls who would very much like the world to think that they’re in far more pain and anguish than they actually are.
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