10 Jokes for People Living With Mental Illness

Life with mental illness is no joke. It’s a painstaking process to get diagnosed, and an even more grueling task learning how to cope with your mental illness alongside daily life. It’s invisible, unpredictable and often unexplainable, and that is a burden at times, one that can often feel overwhelming. While there may not always be practical solutions — no immediate answers, nothing to ease symptoms or make tasks simpler — we do have one tool at our disposal to try and make things more bearable: humor.

Whether it is a case of poking fun at yourself, deploying a bit of gallows humor or just diffusing a tense situation, humor can be a savior. It can be the magic mirror that helps you to see the silver lining, or it can be what helps you to laugh so you don’t cry. Humor is a way of getting through, and can truly be a ray of light in the bleak, unknown darkness that mental health can be.

I rely on humor. It’s saved me on so many dark days when I’ve felt like nothing else could go wrong. Until it did. It has always given me enough hope to keep holding on to the next day, and the next, which is really all we need.

Here are some jokes from The Mighty community, showing that humor really is everywhere, even in the world of mental illness.

1. “Are you seeing anyone?” Like… a hallucination, a therapist or a guy?

submitted by Kellyann M.

2. People ask me if I suffer from bipolar disorder. I do, but only half the time. The other half I thoroughly enjoy it.

submitted by Joanna Peterson

3. Dating with mental health is a little different — third base is when they see you having an anxiety attack.

submitted by Brianna C.

4.“What’s your diagnosis?” Pick three or four letters from your spoon when you’re eating alphabet soup, I’m sure you’ll find it.

submitted by Eugenia K

I liked these so much I decided to add a few of my own!

5. Of course my mental illness is in my head; where else did you expect to find it?

6. The fact that exercise can have such a positive impact on your mental health only goes to prove the world was wrong, and you can indeed run away from your problems.

7. How long do I have to spend in the bath exactly, before my mental health is “fixed”? Because the rest of the family are really hammering on the bathroom door now.

8. Lockdown offers such opportunities for people living with mental illness; particularly in a global pandemic. After all; what’s better than enforced time alone with our thoughts?

9. Oh, meditate, I thought you said levitate — obviously that’s why my condition hasn’t gone away yet. My bad.

10. I tried to tell my new doctor all of my separate diagnoses the other day. He breathalysed me for forgetting how the alphabet goes.

Whether it’s the irony of a situation that’s just laughable, or that single moment of joy in a dark time, one thing we always have, and have to hold onto, is humor. Because without a little laughter, what the hell else do we have?

Need a laugh? Tell us a joke in the comments below!