therapy culture

Most of us really have very little say in the diagnoses we get, even though we all carry a lot of self-knowledge about our bodies and minds. You see the impacts of this a lot when it comes to mental health and neurodivergence: people fighting for years for their autism or ADHD diagnosis, or trying to get an eating disorder diagnosis despite their

Put it all together—diagnostic inflation in medicine; prevalence inflation in media; negativity inflation in news—and one gets the distinct sense that Americans might be making themselves sick with pessimism, anxiety, and gloom. But that’s not all. Just as the U.S. has long been the global economy’s chief cultural exporter—from Coca-Cola to Mickey

It’s very important to show that therapy is a highly relational, nuanced, and contextual conversation. That is very different from what you get on TikTok or IG or your friends in armchairs.

although mental illness is global, the experience of mental illness cannot be separated from culture. If there is a surge of Anglospheric gloom among teenagers, we have to study the culture that young people are consuming with their technology. In the past generation, the English-speaking world, led by the U.S., has experimented with a novel

That ‘individual responsibility’ idea is present in so many messages from awareness campaigns: the idea that it is our duty to reach out to loved ones and services for help; the suggestion that mental health support should come in the form of a ‘service’ at all; the emphasis on individual tools like therapy, meds, self-help, mindfulness and apps to

we should also remember that so much of what we call ‘madness’ or ‘mental illness’ is actually just behaviour that does not lend itself well to the capitalist economic system

there is a difference between destigmatizing mental-health problems and popularizing them to the point that millions of young people are searching their normal feelings for signs of disorders.

When scientific progress destabilized religious authority and the lack of meaning found in a pure rational worldview revealed science’s limitations, movements like Theosophy offered a kind of third way, a path toward understanding the world between science and religion. Theosophy was in conversation with both realms, using tools like magical