Hey, Emo!

The demonisation of people with mental health problems is widespread, destructive, and largely unchallenged.  Discriminatory words like "retard", "spaz", "downie", "scitzo" are in common usage, and words like emo (and to a lesser extent goth) have taken on a secondary meaning as a derogatory term for anyone suffering from depression.

Mental illness is rarely taken seriously. People with chronic mental disabilities such as Down's syndrome and cerebral palsy are forced to endure mockery and intolerance their entire lives, and people who show permanent or temporary symptoms of depression or anxiety are often met with unsympathetic "just get over yourself" attitudes, which often pave the way for full-scale harassment. Those willing to help people with mental illness are the minority, and they generally have either had professional training or some kind of personal experience in the matter.

This intolerance comes from fear and a lack of understanding. As a species, we have been able to study and treat physical illness for millenia, but we are only really just beginning to understand how illness of the mind works. Detailed knowledge of depression, schizophrenia, down's syndrome etc. is uncommon, and mental illness is a huge gap in most people's understanding of the world. People's reaction to the void, including the void around their field of knowledge, is to laugh.
Prejudice against mental illness can also come from the same root as racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Some people (well, all people to a certain degree) simply need to think bad about others in order to think well of themselves, and sectioning off groups of people which it is okay to 'hate' is a convenient way of doing this. Those who show obvious symptoms of chronic or recurring mental illness are easily marked as being a) different and b) vulnerable, so are an easy target for this tendency towards prejudice.

The reason prejudice against the mentally ill is so damaging, perhaps even more so than other prejudices, is that mental illness is already colossally difficult to deal with. Being stigmatised and made to feel shame about your illness piles the pain onto an already tortured mind, and often deters people from seeking the help they need. This is especially true for depression, where if your peers find out that you self-harm or have suicidal tendencies, you will be lumped into the high-school "emo" stereotype (a different thing from the actual emo scene) and systematically made to feel even worse about your state of mind.

Mental illness is one of those prejudices, like transphobia, and until recently homophobia, that has not been discussed or challenged enough for people to realise the damage it causes. Understanding and compassion needs to be spread, and this is already being done through campaigns such as this one.

Please refrain from the casual use of words such as retard, the implication that self-harm and attempted suicide are attention seeking strategies (which they aren't), and from laughing along when someone makes an emo joke. It will lead to a better world for all of us.