therapy culture

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

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.

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

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.

On one hand, there is an importance in gaining clarity when you name certain things. On the other hand, there is a danger that you lose all nuance, that you’re basically trying to elevate your personal comments and personal experience by invoking the higher authority of psychobabble

Micha Frazer-Carroll: When you tell people in casual conversation that you are writing a book on mental health, the first thing they often want to talk about is diagnosis. I think it occupies a really central position in the cultural imagination right now. Lots of people I speak to seem to be coming to a diagnosis as a means of understanding their

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