Overview
The term menhera (メンヘラ) was originally coined by users of the 2channel mental health board as a nickname for themself in order to find each other outside of the site. As the name suggests, it is a combination of "mental health" and "er", meaning "someone who does mental health". The mental health board is a place where people exchange about mental health issues such as mental illness and depression. Therefore, the term was initially only used by people with mental illness as a way to refer to themself in order to form a community.
However, at some point the term started spreading outside of mental health spaces, and is often used in a derogatory manner due to the social stigma towards mental health issues. This has resulted in the term having both a positive and negative meaning, meaning you need to be careful about when to use menhera as it might be easily misunderstood.
On pixiv, there is relatively little prejudice, and there are many works that use menhera from a neutral or understanding perspective, as well as vent art that that expresses the mental struggles menheras have to face in their daily life.
As a Complement to Yandere
Around 2010, the Internet in general became more actively involved in the redefinition of yandere, which had existed as a partially overlapping concept, and was cited more than ever before.
The negative aspects of the yandere that were idealized as moe elements were forced upon them, and self-centered and aggressive images such as "falling in love is a way to distract from loneliness," "'illness' is just a way to attract someone's attention," and "when something is not to their liking, they threatens self-harm or other harm" were propagated.
In contrast to the popularity of yandere among men, menhera tends to focus on women, especially in the area of love, and there is a widespread misunderstanding that menhera and women are completely equal, or that menhera is another name for hypersexuality or narcissistic personality disorder.
As yandere became established as a moe element, there were claims that yandere is a fictional character type in the first place, and in reality it is just a menhera, in a sense trying to bridge the gap between the two.
However, this is also an exaggerated understanding, and it would be more appropriate to assume that there are both real people with yandere-like tendencies and fictional characters with menhera-like tendencies in reality.
Disambiguation
- The character Menhera-chan created by the company Joynet → Kurumi Nanase
- The character and manga series by Bisuko Ezaki → Menhera-chan
