Mental Health and Humour: Your thoughts?

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I used to suffer from an anxiety disorder when I was young. It was hell. I pretty much had a panic attack everyday and I generally worried about dying or making mistakes or doing things without realising it, etc. I've had meltdowns and panic attacks in public because of this and I was on medication for a while as well. My heart was always pumping fast and my muscles were always sore. I had loads of headaches, felt physically sick and felt like I was going to collapse all the time. I thought about my mortality as soon as I even knew about death and I remember losing loads of sleep over it and panicking over it even at the age of 11. This lead me to be very aware that death is all around me, whether it be the food I eat, the people around me, the possible ways I could die, etc etc etc.

Again, it was absolute hell and even though I still panic and worry and fret, it isn't to the extent that it was when I was in my early teens.


Despite all that I have gone through (and all that I am going through), I still find comical portrayals of the mentally illness to be hilarous. When I was a child, "Assburgers" was hilarious! Whenever I see a character who is a completely stereotypical geek/possible aspie (like Malcom's classmates in "Malcom in the Middle"), I think it's hilarious and still love the characters. I laugh whever characters freak out and have panic attacks and a character slaps them in the face and they come out of it (even though that usually doesn't happen).

I know humour is often used as a coping mechanism to overcome mental illness, but what about people who don't suffer from that disorder? There are people who laugh at mental illness who have never suffered from a mental illness before. Is this a way for people to learn about and explore this disorder? Most people are actually decent and I don't think they'd actually laugh at someone on the grounds that they are mentally ill, but I'm sure that mentally ill characters in the media (like The Count from Sesame Street, for example) would be seen as humorous to those same people.

What I want to know is, where do we draw the line? Should we even draw a line at what is funny and what's not? Is humour a good way to overcome stigma or does it create stigma?

I love black humour and even though I poke at serious issues, I will never forget that these issues are serious (it wouldn't be black humour if it wasn't).

What do you think about this, though?

I can appreciate humour that uses mentally ill people but there are limits. I don't have clear definitions for those limits but I know when they are passed. But most of the time, I can take a joke fine.