Keywords

In the preceding chapters I have traced how the Western media landscape of the early twenty-first century has gone from one focused on the positive to one that has room for talk about sadness and mental distress. This happened either in a way that exemplified profitable vulnerability—a marketable mental health awareness that strengthens the authenticity of celebrities and brands—or within the frames of sad girl culture—where capacious ways of feeling bad are explored and critical analyses of why we feel bad are encouraged.

In the world of magazines, this meant increased coverage of issues relating to depression, anxiety, and other diagnoses. Cosmopolitan’s articles on mental health largely took the same tongue-in-cheek approach as their coverage of issues like beauty, sex, and work, and did in this way place mental wellbeing into the same fold as those other everyday matters. Their earlier articles adopt an approach that assumes readers might know someone else who is struggling, and the later ones instead assume that their readers have firsthand experience of mental illness. The tone in their articles tended to take a lighthearted and distanced approach to issues of mental health, ensuring a relatable coverage that touches on difficult topics but never veers too far into uncomfortable territory.

Teen Vogue, on the other hand, often took a straightforward, earnest, and serious approach to issues of mental health, adopting the language of mental health advocacy and awareness by frequently mentioning the importance of speaking out and fighting stigma. This outlet’s branding as “woke” was reflected in the repeated connections made between mental health, inequality, and structures of oppression, as well as in their overall critical stance towards the pharmaceutical industry. Support was a key issue in Teen Vogue, with articles about sensitive topics frequently accompanied by the phone numbers to suicide prevention hotlines or linking to other resources. Pieces in this publication also tended to provide substantial context and information about the diagnoses and difficulties discussed, even in relation to celebrity reporting and easygoing listicles, something that was not the case in Cosmopolitan.

The examination of these magazines’ mental health coverage shows that while Cosmopolitan tended to follow a script for postfeminist media—full of contradictions, covering serious topics in a tongue-in-cheek way that undermined any gravity—Teen Vogue offered a nuanced portrayal of mental illness that incited its readers to a more critical and engaged interpretation of the dominating biomedical paradigm. In this sense Cosmo exemplifies the profitable vulnerability of contemporary media culture, where difficult subjects are shared in easily digestible ways as a means to establish authenticity but ultimately feeds back into neoliberal confidence culture. Teen Vogue’s coverage, on the other hand, was more aligned with the sad girl culture of social media, where critical approaches to feeling bad are found.

When it comes to celebrities the health narratives of Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez show that the mental breakdown and subsequent comeback narratives that were once the prerogative of male celebrities now are also available for women to adopt.Footnote 1 Lovato’s repeated setbacks and confessions especially suggest that stars of all genders can now cast themselves as masters of self-transformation with the help of biomedical diagnoses and intimate confessions about what is happening behind the scenes. Gomez’s health narrative confirms that acknowledgments of mental distress are available also to “spectacularized can-do” girls who were previously portrayed as always successful and well-adjusted.Footnote 2 For both Lovato and Gomez, the confessions about mental distress have served to strengthen the authenticity and realness of their celebrity brands, where their continuous struggles and the disclosure of them become the basis of intimate connections with fans. A cynical reading of their celebrity health narratives may propose that the openness about mental health is just a sign of their teams adopting to an increasingly intimate media landscape where micro-celebrities have set the tone for the levels of personal details that need to be shared to maintain strong connections to fans. These aspects of their health narratives are clear examples of profitable vulnerability, where their struggles literally become valuable parts of their celebrity brands. But a more spacious analysis of what is happening would also acknowledge the support that their fans gain through them being open about these issues, as expressed by Lovato’s fans in Stay Strong and on Twitter after the singer’s 2018 overdose. In the venues and through channels about the stars, fans find each other and can get and provide support in difficult times.

In this chapter I also discuss what I term a postfeminist sadness, by accounting briefly for the emergence of Lana del Rey on the music scene in 2011–2012 and the controversy she caused at the time by displaying female weakness in a popular culture saturated with female strength. At the time del Rey was characterized as an anti-feminist for singing about female vulnerability and dependence on men, but five years later Gomez says in an interview with Vogue that she wants girls to “feel allowed to fall apart,” reflecting a significant shift in dominant media culture towards female expressions of weakness.Footnote 3 The emergence of del Rey and Gomez’s statement a few years later suggests that they were both responding to an overtly positive and empowerment-focused contemporary feminine culture, and that their subsequent successes speak to a yearning by audiences for representations of negative affects like sadness.

In the worlds of social media, young women write about their sadness and mental illness diagnoses in a variety of ways. For some sad girl figures (My Therapist Says) the feeling rules of neoliberalism are promoted, while others (Tumblr and Instagram sad girls, Wollen, Sad Girls Y Qué, and Sad Girls Club) explicitly contest them.

Relatability was a key theme also here, but whereas the Cosmopolitan coverage added humor to keep a distance from the topics, the humorous memes shared on Tumblr and Instagram often functioned as coping mechanisms that created connections between the sad girls and their followers, who could come together in their despair over the state of the world and their psyches. In this way these sad girls represent a kind of rupture in the profitable vulnerability paradigm, in that those participating in these discourses are encouraged to consider depression, anxiety, and mental illness as central aspects of life rather than something to immediately do away with. This is also why they can represent a way forward for the kind of precarity-focused consciousness raising that the Institute for Precarious Consciousness proposes.Footnote 4 This chapter showed that social media platforms provide several different ways of conceptualizing sadness and mental illness, from the sad girls of Tumblr who rest in the inertia of depression and romanticize the melancholy of artists like Lana del Rey, to the sad girls of Instagram who place their own struggles alongside critical readings of contemporary capitalism.

So why does it matter that more media attention was given to women undergoing depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses? It matters because women’s media culture up until this point was highly focused on the upbeat and the positive, with a tendency to privilege feelings like confidence, empowerment, shamelessness, and resilience.Footnote 5 As other scholars of the negative affects that do appear in this landscape have shown, the presence of affective dissonances may be interpreted as a problematization of the “accessibility and appeal of highly individualist career-oriented lifestyles idealised in cultural mythologies of powerful “can-do” girls.”Footnote 6 But in other instances female rage enters the mediated public sphere only to be “simultaneously contained and disavowed.”Footnote 7 And in yet another figuration, the repeated use of “fuck” might signal an irreverent feminist rage that rejects respectability politics along the lines of gender, race, class, and sexuality, in an ultimately hopeful way.Footnote 8

The increased mental illness awareness that I have examined in this book functions in similar ways. Some of the attention given to women’s sadness and mental illness speaks to the failure of an overtly positive women’s media culture, like Audrey Wollen, Lana del Rey, and the sad girls on Instagram and Tumblr. But in other instances, like in Cosmopolitan, depression and anxiety are presented in relatable and distanced ways that serve to make it manageable and nonthreatening to the status quo. I contend that the increased attention to mental illness and sadness was a response to a culture overtly focused on the positive and upbeat, and that the surge in representations of negative affects spoke to the dissatisfactions among women.

Anchoring the Present in History

As I hoped to show in Chap. 2, mental illness diagnoses are neither completely discursive (socially and linguistically constructed) nor fixed neurological truths (biological facts of life that always look the same), but emerge and take shape in a complex interplay between sociocultural discourses and an ever-developing medical science. Throughout the history of Western psychology and psychiatry, the prevalence of certain diagnoses has been tied to contemporary conventions around things like gender. Hysteria, for example, was associated with the very fact of being a woman in the nineteenth century.Footnote 9 In the middle of the twentieth century, schizophrenia was commonly used as a diagnosis for unruly female behavior.Footnote 10 The latter half of the twentieth century was dominated by deinstitutionalization and the increased availability of psychopharmaceuticals. And as Jonathan Michel Metzl has argued, the introduction of a biomedical paradigm in psychiatry did not replace old psychoanalytic ideas about gender with “objective” biological understandings of the psyche.Footnote 11 Throughout the development of psychopharmacology, the connection between femininity and mental dis-ease remained strong. The “’emotional’ problems [that] could be cured simply by visiting a doctor, obtaining a prescription, and taking a pill” were primarily marketed as cures against female ailments, such as “a woman’s frigidity, to a bride’s uncertainty, to a wife’s infidelity.”Footnote 12 Metzl suggests that the anxieties surrounding mothers, and the accompanying framing of psychotropic drugs as the “saviors” of women who risked to reject traditional gender roles, was in reality a worry about the destabilization of traditional family norms. As the worries about traditions changed, so did the model patient for psychopharmaceuticals. In the 1950s it was the frigid or cheating wife who needed to be medicated, in the 1960s and 1970s it was the feminist who dared to question patriarchal institutions like marriage and essentialist male-female roles. In the 1990s and early 2000s the workplace became the primary site for gender “struggles.” Drugs like Prozac promised to keep the working woman cheery and optimistic so that she could perform the tasks required by her particular line of work.Footnote 13

At the start of the twenty-first century, women’s media culture was dominated by positive and upbeat messages about working hard to succeed in the workplace, so much so that women were configured as the ideal neoliberal subjects who, by enough work on the self, could reach almost infinite levels of achievement.Footnote 14 Antidepressant drugs like Prozac were used by a high number of women, but they were not widely discussed in women’s media up until the mid-2010s. When they start to be discussed, alongside other experiences of living with mental illness, it is often framed as a brave choice by those speaking out, juxtaposed against a culture that tends to value only female strength. Selena Gomez’s statement that girls “need to feel allowed to fall apart” is an example of this that almost holds out the promise of a culture that does not value work and success as the most important aspects of life. The onslaught of confessions by celebrities from 2015 and onwards about living with various diagnoses and traumas could in an optimistic reading be seen as “proof” that the demands of late-stage capitalism and the precarity of life in neoliberal states was finally being acknowledged as unsustainable. But many of these narratives were quickly reabsorbed in the confidence culture and rather than destabilize neoliberal ideals they worked to affirm them by modeling ways of constantly working on the self to better and optimize it. The increasingly precarious state of life in the West demands that subjects take increased responsibility for their own wellbeing and survival. Rather than challenge this notion and call for collective solutions to structural problems, the profitable vulnerability we see in celebrity health narratives and the most mainstream mental health discourses reinforce it by celebrating individualized answers to illness/difficulty.

Through Demi Lovato’s health narrative, for example, we learn that pain and struggle are part of everyday life. But rather than pausing for too long to dwell on what is hurting, one should work hard to overcome difficulties and show resilience. The sequence in their second tell-all documentary, Simply Complicated, where life coach Mike Bayer describes how Lovato was living in a sober home without their own cellphone while working as a judge on X-factor is a telling example of this. In this figuration Lovato’s main function is as a value-producing artist brand, not a human being. Not even when one is recovering from addiction (as well as dealing with bipolar disorder and bulimia) can work be put on pause. One might counter this reasoning by saying that of course Lovato has to work, they are a pop star and a multimillion business, and anything else would be out of the ordinary. And that is absolutely true, but alongside that fact is the increasingly intimate state of contemporary media. Lovato’s health narrative is not presented as that of a distant and unreachable star living an extraordinary life of luxury (even if this might be the case), but is framed as ordinary and accessible to audiences through the documentaries and the star’s social media accounts. Like this the singer’s handling of her troubles (addiction, bipolar disorder, bulimia) is presented not as exceptional in the sense that it is only available to the rich and famous, but as common and relatable tools for self-improvement that can also be employed by their audiences. In other words, in an increasingly intimate media landscape, mental illnesses and other difficulties are acknowledged to show authenticity and build stronger connections with fans and followers, but they then tend to be configured within narratives of self-optimization and improvement so that the overcoming of tragedy gives added cadence to messages of resilience.

If the increased attention given to mental illness and sadness was an indirect response to a culture overtly focused on the positive, the way vulnerability is employed as a tool for profitability and more work on the self can be seen as one way in which neoliberal capitalism has co-opted and absorbed its own critique. By placing the causes and solutions to mental illness in a purely biomedical paradigm any sociocultural reasons for feeling bad can be ignored, and the status quo can be maintained. But I hope to have shown, throughout this book, that there also exists more spacious discourses around mental health, in both mainstream media and in the niche worlds of social media.

Relatability’s Political Dimension as a Source of Support and Solidarity

Beyond a cynical analysis that reads every celebrity confession as a marketing strategy, it also has to be acknowledged that the openness of celebrities and mainstream popular media provides opportunities for support to be given to fans, readers, and followers. This happens partly in the act of reading/hearing/seeing about someone with the same issues as oneself and learning that one is not alone, which may in itself serve a soothing and supportive function. But also in the possibility to connect with peers or professionals. This connection can happen between fans, like among Lovato’s fans on Twitter after their overdose, between followers on social media who find each other in the comments section, or in Teen Vogue’s direct provision of National Suicide Prevention Hotline numbers and other resources. In all of these instances an added step, beyond merely relating to each other in recognition, happens in that some form of action occurs to better the situation for the one suffering who has sought out these media.

Relatability also has a political dimension as a source of solidarity. This is seen in Teen Vogue’s coverage that showed what it looks like to place usually personal and apolitical issues like mental illness in dialogue with structural issues like racism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia. By placing the emphasis on support, the magazine also showed what it looks like to provide readers with resources for tangible ways to get better. Among the sad girls on Instagram, memes that combine mental illness symptoms and political critique function to both create humor and distance from a difficult experience (living with depression/anxiety/bipolar disorder) and produce connections around the despair of the state of the world. The smooth and acritical relatability is somewhat ruptured, in that it is mixed with anticapitalist messages about things like the connections between the US health care system and Wall Street. Here users come together in humor and provide support in a critical context.

In the worlds of social media, the various iterations of the sad girl and the contexts formed there show how people can share their experiences of depression and anxiety in ways that complicate the regular biomedical narratives and function as nodes of support for those who are suffering. As discussed in the fifth chapter, this could constitute what the Institute for Precarious Consciousness calls a “precarity-focused consciousness raising,” but it can also be another iteration of what Anne Allison calls “affective activism.”Footnote 15 Allison identifies this in youth-led activism in Japan, where participants shared their own experiences of attempted suicide in an attempt to combat the high suicide rates in the country. She describes this activism as one that crafts “new forms of sociality to the end not of capital or the market … but of helping anyone/everyone survive.”Footnote 16 Allison calls this “a vitalist politics that creates forms of connectedness that, quite literally, sustain people in their everyday lives.”Footnote 17 The online spaces where various sad girls can express themselves and come together in their despair might be seen in a similar way. Through humorous memes immediate relief is had, users feel less alone, and support can be found.

Final Thoughts

As I am finishing this book in the summer of 2022, the world seems to have been on fire for a while. The COVID-19 pandemic is not yet over, there is a war raging in Ukraine, inflation has made the everyday costs of living increase for people all over the world, and in the US Roe vs. Wade was just overturned, making abortion illegal and setting back women’s rights significantly. And that is not even mentioning the climate crisis that is already in full swing and only about to get worse, with little government action being taken to stop it. Many things, not least the future of Western liberal democracies, seem to be uncertain. In these times of upheaval, many people seem to be suffering psychologically. The World Health Organization has reported that the pandemic led to a 25% increase in the prevalence of depression and anxiety worldwide and calls on all countries to expand mental health services and support.Footnote 18

What is clear is that media play a significant role in how people understand and take care of their mental wellbeing in this fast-changing world. During the first year of the pandemic, people in lockdown turned to friends and celebrities on social media to get support, with the spring of 2020 seeing a surge in online activity among both regular people and celebrities. If difficult subjects were approached in a relatable way so as to not become too overwhelming even in a pre-pandemic world, the same mechanism can be seen in the post-COVID media landscape. Online humorous memes about quarantine, lockdown, and mask-wearing proliferated, and the relatable approach became a way to talk about difficult things with a distance that made them less frightening and more manageable.

Since the start of the pandemic, in the world of social media multiple accounts that provide both humorous memes and tangible support have proliferated. Examples of this include Margeaux Feldman, who through the Instagram account softcore_trauma shares memes about recovering from trauma.Footnote 19 Their memes employ the language of attachment theory and polyvagal trauma therapy and clearly serve both a comedic and supportive function. On the Instagram account of writer-activist Adrienne Maree Brown supportive memes are mixed with poetry and calls to political action.Footnote 20 And Sonalee Rashatwar, who posts under the handle thefatsextherapist, is only one of many mental health professionals who share advice and support to their large group of followers.Footnote 21

I hope that my arguments in this book have shown the role of both popular media and social media in shaping perceptions about mental health. The sites I have examined show that there are a multitude of ways to talk about mental illness and to provide support for those who are suffering. Media as sites for understanding and dealing with mental health thus need to be studied further, and taken into account in efforts to improve mental health care, not only for young girls and women, but for everyone.