Info ♡ Anatomy ♡ Origin ♡ Subculture

The Origin and Birth of Menhera

In this article, I would like to briefly summarize all the information that was collected in past articles.

The term Menhera was born in 2ch

The term Menhera was originally born inside the mental health board of the giant anonymous BBS 2channel. Originally, this board was called “BPD board”* due to the lack of mental health related terms in the japanese language.

In response to the “We want a board that deals with mental health as whole” demand of the users, such as the above, the name was changed to “mental health board” on 18th August 2000, and it expanded to be about mental health in general.

On the 2ch mental health board, the term “Menheru” was born as abbreviation for “mental health board”. From this on, the mental health board was nicknamed “Menheru”, it should be noted that it was never intended to refer to a person.

Around the beginning of 2001, “Menheru" was sometimes mistakenly used for “a person that uses the mental health board”, “a person with mental health issues” and “a person who is sick”. Eventually, this misuse of the board name was replaced with “Menheraa”, the “aa” being used in the same “to do”-sense as the “er” suffix of the english language, like in “user” or “worker”. After a while, it was shortened to “Menhera”.

In short:

…and under those circumstances, the term “Menhera” was born.

In modern language, it is important to know the background of a term’s creation.

By the way, before Menheru was born, there was no single positive term related to mental health in Japan and discriminative insults, such as “psycho” and “mad”, were highly popular in the 90s. It can be inferred that Menheru was the first neutral term refering to people suffering from mental health issues.

As the above is only a summary, those who are looking for more detailed information are highly recommended to read this extended article.

(* translator’s note: “躁鬱” was used as term for most mental disorders back then.)

The misuse of “Menhera=troublesome person” was born

Now, we already confirmed that Menhera was born inside 2ch’s mental health board and originally refers to “a person that seeks mental well-being”.

On the other hand, as of 2016, people suddenly started to use Menhera in a negative sense, just like how some people do it with “Tumblr”, examples of the meaning range from “troublesome person” to “attention whore”.

When I tried to google “Menhera”, articles along the lines of “Watch out for Menhera-type women!” and “How to tell if she’s a psycho hiding her illness!” were popping up.

According to those articles, the features of Menhera are the following:

... and so on.

People that won’t accept their failure and those who self-pitty are likely to have mental health issues, but while having a hashtag flooded with selfies of the same person may be annoying, it doesn’t have anything to do with mental health, nor does any choice of hairstyle.

Furthermore:

There are so many “articles” distributed in online magazines that make me want to say “Do they think we are a new species of monster?!”, and they help spreading the confusion regarding the meaning of “Menhera”. Below is a screenshot from such an article, “Is she secretly a Menhera-type woman? 35 ways to tell!”, and it can be said that articles like this were playing a part in the misuse.

But why has the misuse of the term Menhera spread so far?

My guess is that this happend because 2ch got an extreme amount of users; many people from the mental health board will proudly call themself Menhera on social networks. As it is with everything else, the bad apples of the userbase would gain lots of attention due to causing drama and the conclusion of outsiders that everyone Menhera must be like this might have been strengthened.

At some point, people with the characteristics of borderline personality disorder in particular were strongly associated with the term Menhera. The intimidating confirmation behaviors caused by the fear of being abandoned (asking “Do you really love me?” a lot, sending many worried messages when you don’t respond quickly, etc), acts of self-harm due to a very serious feeling of emptiness (wrist-cutting, overdosing on medicine, etc) and similar appear very strange in the eyes of many normal people; they probably began to be seen as joke.

In addition, some people on Twitter seem to think that the negative stereotypes are required in order to be Menhera. Those will upload photos of their self-harm, report about their latest overdosing, and all that while tagging it as Menhera. This began to spread the negative image even further, more so because of actual Menhera complaining about it.

From that misuse, the term was also associated with the following:

It can be concluded that the meaning got twisted.

Regarding these circumstances, there is an article that thoroughly examined 10 years of 2ch’s archives and social media posts. I hope you will read it when you have time.

The true meaning of the term Menhera

Now, the usage of “Menhera” has been divided into the following two:

Besides the original meaning in 1, why was 2 born? In short, “those not familiar with mental health issues may find them ridiculous”.

People use Menhera to share their experiences regarding mental health in the form of vent art, and those works would become popular online, resulting in the depiction of Menhera in manga and anime, but this seems to have caused that some people think of Menhera as fictive, “crazy” character type (similar to Yandere) instead of real people that create or wear vent art.

The term Menhera was originally born as slang, the meaning changes depending on the context, but it is a very interesting fact that the original meaning of “a person that seeks mental well-being” is still the most common usage. No matter how much time passes, as long as we have emotions there can be issues linked to them. In other words, Menhera in the sense of “a person that seeks mental well-being” will always exist.

That’s why we hope you will only use “Menhera” in this context, which is the original meaning, with great care.