Channelling the Community: Discord Users' Understanding of Community and Mental Illness

Abstract

In marginalized communities, humour has been used to manage stigma in internet spaces which facilitate the gathering of individuals with stigmatizing commonalities. This thesis endeavours to show the methods that emerge from internet communities, specifically through the platform Discord, that are used to redefine how information about mental illness is conveyed and how it entails personal interaction. Focused on the way depression memes are interpreted by users of the Discord, and how the need for humour is used as a tool to distance oneself from interpersonal relationships, I have examined how the fear of being labelled mentally ill still manifests itself within a space originally intended for transgressive content. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Discord's 2meirl4meirl server, and consisting of participant observation as well as informal interviews, I argue that users, by attempting to shed from themselves their marginalized status by interacting in Discord, introduce new, but faulty, methods of stigma management.