Keeping up with the normies: Rememiotizing SpongeBob SquarePants in mental health memes

Abstract

Mental health discussions online are increasing and becoming more multimodal. Memes relying on pop-cultural references are integral parts of online cultures, and similar memes on mental health are also gaining popularity. Drawing on multimodal discourse studies, this article examines mental health memes (collected mainly from Imgur.com and Instagram and by using reverse snowball method) utilizing imagery from the cartoon series SpongeBob SquarePants. The article introduces a new analytical concept developed specifically for meme analysis: rememiotization. Building on scholarship on resemiotization and entextualization, rememiotization focuses on how semiotic resources are used and socio-cultural discourses materialized in memetic context, thus contributing to both meme studies and digital discourse studies. Exploring questions on how SpongeBob is rememiotized into mental health memes and how rememiotization participates in representing mental health issues, the article suggests that memes use different semiotic resources to represent issues related to mental health. Specifically, the memes represent how people relate to their mental health problems, other people, and treatment – emphasizing the feeling of social and societal exclusion. The paper also shows how these memes use humour to critique socio-cultural norms around mental health, de-centring the problem-talk focused discourses on mental health while representing experience-based narratives. Still, the memes pathologize and individualize mental health problems and thereby participate in contemporary diagnostic and therapeutic culture. By illuminating how people themselves process living with mental distress in memes, this paper provides crucial information about mental health not found in other contexts and offers new insight for successful mental health communication.