Social Media Sadness: Sad Girl Culture and Radical Ways of Feeling Bad

Abstract

This chapter turns to social media platforms and looks at the figure of the sad girl as she emerged online as an indirect response to a popular culture overtly focused on happiness. It discusses how she appeared on primarily Tumblr and Instagram, exploring the general sad girl discourses on these platforms as well as some examples that received extra attention. These include the artist Audrey Wollen and her sad girl theory, the girl group Sad Girls Y Qué, the Instagram club Sad Girls Club, the social media brand My Therapist Says, and prominent Instagram accounts. Here I look at the critical and acritical tendencies within the figure, acknowledging both the potentially subversive aspects of the activist-oriented sad girls and the more commercialized versions of popular sad girls. This chapter explores how Tumblr sad girls might be seen as resting in sadness; how relatability is employed as a political strategy by some Instagram sad girls; the ambivalence of normalization; and the limits of using commercial social media platforms for meaningful social action.

Full text

Fredrika Thelandersson
21st Century Media and
Female Mental Health
Profitable Vulnerability and
Sad Girl Culture

21st Century Media and Female Mental Health

FredrikaThelandersson
21st Century Media
and Female Mental
Health
Protable Vulnerability andSad Girl Culture

ISBN 978-3-031-16755-3 ISBN 978-3-031-16756-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16756-0
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FredrikaThelandersson
Media and Communication Studies
Lund University
Lund, Sweden

To all the sad girls out there –
You will make it through

vii
This book started out as my doctoral dissertation, which I wrote as a
graduate student in media studies at Rutgers University’s School of
Communication and Information. In the process of turning the text into
a book manuscript, I have teased out the main arguments that at the dis-
sertation stage were only subtly expressed. This has involved developing
the claims about the double nature of twenty-rst-century mental health
awareness, which takes shape as both protable vulnerability and sad girl
culture. I have also added a background chapter that traces the history of
sad and mad women in the Anglo-American West, which historicizes my
understanding of contemporary conceptions of gendered mental illness.
The person that most inuenced the early stages of this research project
was my doctoral advisor, Jack Bratich, and I thank him for his intellectual
generosity and belief in my scholarship. Without his support and guidance
this book would not be here today. My dissertation committee members,
Marija Dalbello, Mary Chayko, and Rosalind Gill, offered the project
encouragement and perspective. Marija was an encouraging and challeng-
ing mentor from my rst year in the PhD program; without her classes and
direction my scholarship would not be where it is today. Thanks to Mary
for her insights given to the project and for being an inspirational and
educational supervisor to my teaching efforts. And I am so grateful for the
support of Ros, whose work has inspired my analytical thinking tremen-
dously—it is an academic rarity and privilege to get rsthand input from
the person you singlehandedly cite the most.
Thanks also to the many other people who made my time at Rutgers so
enriching and inuenced the direction of my work. Susan Keith, thank
Acknowledgments

viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
you for your mentorship as a teacher, colleague, and departmental chair.
The community of doctoral students and candidates was a source of inspi-
ration and comfort. Thank you especially to Katie McCollough, Vyshali
Manivannan, Henry Boachi, and Omar Hammad.
Thanks to Greg Seigworth and the team behind Capacious: Journal for
Emerging Affect Inquiry for arranging the inspiring affect conferences in
2015, 2018, and 2019, and for publishing my article about Tumblr sad
girls. This book grew out of that rst paper I presented at the 2015 con-
ference and was then given signicant improvement in the generous peer-
review process during the spring of 2017. Parts of Chap. 5 are based on
the article I published in Capacious, and I hope this book will live as vivid
a life as that publication has. The two conferences and the summer school
have given me so much intellectual inspiration and an international schol-
arly home in the most capacious way. I am also thankful to Greg for his
feedback and encouragement when this book was only at the pro-
posal stage.
I am so grateful to the American Association of University Women
(AAUW) for awarding me with the 2019–2020 American Dissertation
Fellowship, without which I would have not been able to focus full time
on the dissertation during that last year of writing. It was a remarkable gift
to be able to turn my primary attention to research during an entire year,
and that dedication denitely made it a better project and book in the end.
Since I left Rutgers, I have gained a new scholarly home in the
Department of Communication and Media at Lund University, and the
conversations I have had with my wonderful colleagues there have inu-
enced the nal form that this manuscript has taken. Thanks especially to
my mentor and colleague Helena Sandberg, who is ever-encouraging and
inspiring.
Beyond the academy I want to thank Malmö-based leftist organization
Krakel, which has given me a non-institutional intellectual home where
ideas have ourished. I am especially grateful for the study circle “Psyket i
kapitalismen,” led by Mirjam Katzin during the fall of 2021. The conver-
sations we had in that forum helped my thinking about psychic life in
contemporary capitalism tremendously, and they have most denitely
inuenced the development of my arguments in this book.
I also want to thank Linda Forsell and the performing arts company
PotatoPotato, with whom I shared my research on sad girls, which then
resulted in the theater performance SADLAND.It was so inspiring to see
my research expressed in new and provocative ways. This experience

ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
convinced me of the importance of reaching beyond academic venues to
communicate our work to those who are directly affected by it.
Thank you to my family, spread out in Sweden and Germany, who have
supported me in every step of the way. And thanks to my nonacademic
friends on both sides of the Atlantic for being there, for trying to under-
stand, and for providing support. Ira Potashner, thank you for your con-
tinued guidance and professional insights.
Lastly, thank you to the sad girls of Tumblr and Instagram: you have
taught and helped me so much. This book is for you.

xi
contents
1 Introduction 1
2 A Historical Lineage of Sad and Mad Women 33
3 Mental Health in Magazines: Relatability and Critique
in Cosmopolitan and Teen Vogue 61
4 Celebrity Mental Health: Intimacy, Ordinariness,
and Repeated Self- Transformation 103
5 Social Media Sadness: Sad Girl Culture and Radical
Ways of Feeling Bad 157
6 Conclusion 209
Index 221

xiii
Fig. 2.1 Augustine displaying one stage of the hysteric attack,
Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière 43
Fig. 5.1 100% Sad, Tumblr post by Less- love- more-alcohol, source:
Thelandersson, “Social Media Sad Girls and the Normalization
of Sad States of Being” 163
Fig. 5.2 “Medicated,” Tumblr post by Grvnge- nicotine, source:
Thelandersson, “Social Media Sad Girls and the Normalization
of Sad States of Being” 164
Fig. 5.3 Banner of Tumblr user Grvnge-nicotine, source: Thelandersson,
“Social Media Sad Girls and the Normalization of Sad States of
Being” 164
Fig. 5.4 Compilation of posts on the Tumblr account of user Grvnge-
nicotine, source: Thelandersson, “Social Media Sad Girls and
the Normalization of Sad States of Being” 165
Fig. 5.5 “Girls just wanna have Serotonin,” meme by Julia Hava,
@binchcity 177
Fig. 5.6 Seroquel meme by Haley Byam, @ghosted1996 180
Fig. 5.7 Meme about the US healthcare system by Haley Byam,
@ghosted1996 181
Fig. 5.8 “Walking around the mall/Sad socialist memes” by
@manicpixiememequeen 184
list of figures

1
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Sadness and mental health awareness seem to be everywhere in the popu-
lar media landscape of the 2020s. From the music streaming service
Spotify’s wide range of playlists tailored for sad moods (with titles like
“Sad Bops,” “Down in the Dumps,” and “All the feels”), the US premium
cable channel HBO adding mental health disclaimers to shows that depict
particular ailments, British royal Prince Harry participating in the launch
of a mental health app to aid military service members while his wife
Meghan Markle revealed that she had been suicidal in their widely publi-
cized interview with Oprah, to one of the biggest pop stars of the moment
being Billie Eilish, a young woman making sad, dark songs while openly
talking about her own struggles with depression.1
The presence of sadness and mental illness awareness in mainstream
public culture is a fairly recent phenomenon. Several scholars have dened
the media landscape of the early twenty-rst century as focused on happi-
ness, creating a culture that privileges the positive and energetic while
dismissing pain, injury, and failure.2 As recently as 2017, pop star Selena
Gomez explained her choice to be open about her struggles with anxiety
and depression by saying: “We girls, we’re taught to be almost too resil-
ient, to be strong and sexy and cool and laid-back … We also need to feel
allowed to fall apart.”3 The indirect proposition here was that it was out of
the ordinary to speak about such issues in public, and that the general
expectation of young women is that they show strength and exibility at
all costs. Along with Gomez’s statement, the last decade has seen an
increase in representations and conversations about mental health in
© The Author(s) 2023
F. Thelandersson, 21st Century Media and Female Mental Health,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16756-0_1

2
popular culture at large. Popular magazines and digital publications are
regularly covering issues like depression and anxiety. Countless listicles of
celebrities that have opened up about their struggles with mental illness
have appeared.4 Scripted characters with various psychic ailments pop up
across the TV and movie landscape.5 On social media platforms young
people are self-identifying with the moniker “sad girl,” inhabiting a posi-
tion that places negative feelings at the forefront. And there is an endless
stream of accounts that offer support for various diagnoses and general
self-care, made up of both amateurs and mental health professionals who
supply their followers with advice and relief.6
How did the positive media landscape of the early 2000s turn into one
that frequently addresses mental illness and trauma? 21st Century Media
and Female Mental Health: Protable Vulnerability and Sad Girl Culture
charts the shift in Western media culture from a primarily positive and
upbeat affective register to one that has space for some talk of negative and
downtrodden feelings. I examine the increased visibility of mental illness
and sadness in popular Anglo-American media by analyzing a set of texts
about depression, anxiety and general mental illness. These texts come
from three primary sites—women’s magazines, female celebrities, and
social media—chosen for their function as purveyors of scripts for how we
come to think about and experience mental health and illness.
Framework
Drawing on the work of Rosalind Gill, Christina Scharff, Diane Negra,
Yvonne Tasker, and others, I situate the increased visibility of mental ill-
ness against a backdrop of a neoliberal and postfeminist culture that privi-
leges individualism and personal choice, placing the responsibility for
happiness and wellbeing solely on the individual.7 I look at these contem-
porary iterations of mental illness specically in relation to gender, follow-
ing thinkers who dene women as ideal neoliberal subjects.8 Women in
particular are hailed as subjects of capacity that have the potential for great
success if they just work hard enough on themselves (more on that below).
Depression, however, is associated with debility and the incapacity to act.
Feminist scholars have also written about the psychic life of neoliberal-
ism and postfeminism, paying attention to how contemporary media cul-
ture focuses increasingly on the psychological, calling on subjects to work
on not only their bodies and careers but also on their moods and atti-
tudes.9 The feelings that are privileged here tend to be positive ones:
F. THELANDERSSON

3
condence, empowerment, shamelessness, and resilience.10 Attention has
also been given to the appearance of negative affects in this otherwise posi-
tive emotional landscape. Examples of this include Amy Shields Dobson
and Akane Kanai’s study of affective dissonances in post-recessional televi-
sion shows aimed at young women, Shani Orgad and Gill’s exploration of
mediated female rage in the #MeToo era, and Helen Wood’s examination
of the prevalence of the word “fuck” in contemporary feminist speech.11
These analyses present a complicated affective landscape. The presence of
affective dissonances may be read as a problematization of the “accessibil-
ity and appeal of highly individualist career-oriented lifestyles idealised in
cultural mythologies of powerful “can-do” girls.”12 But in other instances
female rage enters the mediated public sphere only to be “simultaneously
contained and disavowed.”13 And in yet another guration, the repeated
use of “fuck” might signal an irreverent feminist rage that rejects respect-
ability politics along the lines of gender, race, class, and sexuality, in an
ultimately hopeful way.14 Rage in particular appeared as a powerful affect
from which to build feminist politics after the 2016 election of Donald
Trump.15 Activist-scholar Brittney Cooper has, in the tradition of Audre
Lorde, called for an “eloquent rage” that is especially important for black
feminist action as a source of energy that gives strength to keep ghting as
well as clarity in what needs to be changed.16
Orgad and Gill have brilliantly described how the imperative to con-
dence for women within twenty-rst-century media culture often works
to dismantle feminist messages of their structural critique and place the
solution to social injustice on the individual.17 By working on their con-
dence and self-esteem, women are presumed to overcome systemic
issues. Orgad and Gill also acknowledge a seemingly contradictory move,
which they call “the vulnerability turn,” where women are encouraged to
express their weaknesses, insecurities and self-doubts.18 But rather than
challenge the condence cult, this vulnerability works to reinforce it,
where brands often introduce insecurity only to replace it with “deant
individualism.”19
Angela McRobbie also identies this tendency to allow weakness in
contemporary media culture, but she denes it as the “imperfect” and
places it within a triangulation of affects expressed as the “perfect—imper-
fect—resilience.”20 Here the perfect encourages women to succeed meri-
tocratically in a highly competitive environment that favors a neoliberal
“leadership-feminism.” The imperfect is then expressed as a response to
the “unviability of the emphasis on success,” but it is articulated within
1 INTRODUCTION

4
severely limited parameters and quickly followed by a resilience that
“springs into existence as a ‘bounce-back’ mechanism.”21
My book takes off from these previous theoretizations and looks at
what I call the “turn to sadness” in twenty-rst-century media culture. My
analysis shares similarities with both Orgad and Gill’s vulnerability turn
and McRobbie’s imperfect, in that it describes what I term a “protable
vulnerability” that allows for market-friendly iterations of weakness that t
within the otherwise largely positive affective register of mainstream media
culture. But in addition to this protable vulnerability, I also delineate
more spacious ways of feeling bad within the sad girl culture(s) of social
media. What I hope to do in this analysis is to look closer at how sadness
as both diagnosis and general affect is allowed to take up space in various
media texts and what it can tell us about the state of psychic ailments, heal-
ing, and recovery in relation to neoliberal capitalist knowledge systems.
The Sites ofStudy
Women’s magazines have long functioned as guides for women and girls
that model how to live life in the most ideal or proper way. McRobbie
writes in her classic study of the girls’ magazine Jackie that publications in
this genre “dene and shape the woman’s world, spanning every stage
from early childhood to old age [where] the exact nature of the woman’s
role is spelt out in detail, according to her age and status.”22 One aspect of
this guidance was the supportive function provided by these magazines,
where experts answered questions about everything from relationships to
medical problems.
For a long time, women’s magazines were a stable xture of the media
landscape, with various outlets aimed at specic niche segments of the
female audience (like working mothers, sophisticated black women,
fashion- forward twenty-somethings, and so on). Since the start of the
twenty-rst century and the rise of digital media, however, women’s mag-
azines have struggled with declining revenues as advertisers and readers
move to free online platforms.23 The traditional magazines still hold the
role of advice givers but celebrities, inuencers, and peer networks on
social media have also stepped into that role and now function as similar
guiding lights. 21st Century Media and Female Mental Health thus looks
at three sites——magazines, celebrities, and social media networks——to
understand the contemporary discourse around gendered mental health. I
F. THELANDERSSON

5
understand these various media sites as actively dening what it means to
suffer from depression and anxiety, as well as providing solutions for how
to deal with these ailments.
When it comes to social media, the popularity of various platforms and
the trends that proliferate on them shift with great speed. I do not make
any claims to denite truths about the culture of various social media plat-
forms, rather I hope to provide a snapshot of what the conversations
around mental health looked like during the 2010s on the specic plat-
forms discussed. And as any astute observer of social media knows, niche
cultures proliferate with remarkable speed and no static description of
them can accurately portray their complex dynamics. Nevertheless, I here
attempt to capture a glimpse of how mental illness and sadness took shape
in the digital worlds of the 2010s.
Within the frames of this book I dene the contemporary moment as
the period from 2008 and onward, with an understanding that the cul-
tural and social landscape in the West was signicantly affected by the
2008 nancial crisis and the subsequent bank bailouts and austerity mea-
sures. The nancial recession can be read as the starting point for the cur-
rent precarious state of life in the West. The data collection for this project
originally covered the time frame 2008-2018, as a way to make it manage-
able. The bulk of material that my analysis is based on comes from this
period, but relevant events that took place after this time frame has also
been included where appropriate. The COVID-19 pandemic, for exam-
ple, started after I had concluded my rst analysis of the material. This is
thus not a study of how COVID has changed how mental health is talked
about in the media. It is rather an examination of how the popular media
landscape has, successively since 2008, become more and more intimate
and conducive for conversations around previously private topics like
depression and anxiety, something that came to a head during the pan-
demic year of 2020. Because what became obvious early on in the
COVID-19 crisis was the extent to which the media we consume in our
everyday life function not only as information suppliers, but also very
much as nodes of support in uncertain times. As people all over the world
were stuck inside, many turned to friends as well as celebrities on social
media to stay connected and get support. The study of how various media
shape our understanding of mental health is in this sense of heightened
relevance as the world encounters the new normal of a post-
COVID- 19 world.
1 INTRODUCTION

6
Guiding Questions
21st Century Media and Female Mental Health examines the contempo-
rary structure of feeling that produces these increased representations of
mental illness.24 I ask how female subjects are hailed as mentally ill in vari-
ous mediated spaces. My analysis is focused on depression and anxiety, as
terms referring both to medicalized discourses of control and psychosocial
affects like vulnerability, sadness, and melancholia. Other common diag-
noses, such as bipolar disorder, also appeared repeatedly in my media
archive and have also been included.
My analysis adds to the understanding of the changing media landscape
of advice-giving, from magazines to celebrities and peers on social media.
It contributes to the eld of feminist media studies by studying the entan-
glement of emotions and popular feminism.
The key questions guiding me fall into two categories, rst a set of
questions concerning the gendered effects of neoliberalism regard-
ing health:
What do the contemporary conversations around mental health look like in
feminine/female dominated media spaces? What denitions and solutions
are provided? And how do the discourses around these sad affects relate to
an otherwise upbeat and positive media culture? What does it mean that a
culture that tends to privilege the positive now is making way for talk of
mental illnesses like depression and anxiety? Are we seeing a repudiation of
the “happiness industry” or is it merely another side of the same coin? What
happens with the innitely capable neoliberal subject when she acknowl-
edges weakness?
And a second set of questions referring to the role of digital media
platforms in these processes:
What meanings and connections emerge in digital spaces when women
share their experiences of mental illness with each other there? Do the de-
nitions shared contribute new and more spacious ways of feeling bad? And
what potential for change in perceptions around mental illness do these
discourses provide?
These questions take a critical approach to media culture by interrogat-
ing how meanings are produced around issues of mental health. But I am
also following scholars like Sarah Projansky, who “draws on a feminist
F. THELANDERSSON

7
media studies methodology in pursuit of optimistic anti-racist queer read-
ings” of representations of girlhood.25 In my research I have looked for
potentially subversive aspects in portrayals of depression and anxiety. Here
I have also taken into account the often-unequal representation of who
suffers from mental illness. A certain kind of girl sadness is often associated
with white and thin bodies26 and the expressions of sadness and pain that
received the most attention online during the time period I examine have
been criticized for only referring to white women.27 But the online dis-
course around mental health also includes conversations that question
exclusionary representations of what it means to suffer psychically.
Examples include artist and mental health advocate Dior Vargas’ “People
of Color and Mental Illness Photo Project” which was started in 2014 to
raise awareness about mental health in communities of color and Sad Girls
Club, an Instagram account and in person meetup group that focuses
specially on the experience of women of color living with mental illness.28
Teen Vogue also publishes pieces about the connection between mental
health and structural inequalities regularly.29
It is particularly within the online spaces that I have found what resem-
bles subversive portrayals of living with depression, anxiety, and other
diagnoses. I discuss the activity by some of the sad girls on Tumblr and
Instagram with the scholarly activist collective Institute for Precarious
Consciousness’s notion of a “precarity-focused consciousness raising” to
move out from under the debilitating grip of anxiety, which they dene as
the dominant affect of the contemporary moment.30
One of the indirect questions for this project has also been whether or
not the mere presence of mental health awareness constitutes a challenge
to a culture focused on happiness and success. In other words, is it auto-
matically a “good” thing to talk more about depression, anxiety, and other
issues that affect our psyches? The short answer is “it’s complicated.” The
example of Meghan Markle revealing that she had been suicidal while liv-
ing as a royal in a widely publicized interview with Oprah is illustrative in
this regard. On the one hand, a cynical reading of the situation might be
that Markle and her prince husband choose to align themselves with men-
tal health causes and revealed some personal struggle to appear authentic
and relatable (a belief expressed by various pundits at the time). This anal-
ysis can be true but one must at the same time acknowledge that Markle’s
confession opened up space for the acknowledgement of what it means to
live with depression and suicidal thoughts in social contexts where such
issues have been taboo.31 Such is the complexity of mental health
1 INTRODUCTION

8
awareness– it is rarely an easy either or of “good” versus “bad” awareness,
but instead a nuanced web of elements that conform to existing power
structures.
My aim with this book is to explore multiple aspects of contemporary
gendered mental health discourse, both the “bad” and the “good.” The
arguments of Orgad and Gill and McRobbie mentioned above, which
describe the presence of vulnerability and weakness in media culture as
largely feeding back into the neoliberal logic of condence and resilience,
are compelling.32 I follow their understandings and add primarily two ele-
ments: 1) I look at what the sanctioned vulnerability looks like——how it
functions as a generator of authenticity that forms close relations between
brand and follower; and 2) I do a reparative reading that also acknowl-
edges the more spacious ways of feeling bad that the increased conversa-
tions around mental health open up, primarily on social media within the
sad girl culture there. I hope the reader can keep these two aspects in mind
at the same time and hold space for complexity and nuance.
Notes onMethodology
In terms of methodology, I conduct a feminist media studies analysis of
discourses around mental health in popular culture and on social media,
using a multi-methods approach that moves across magazines, celebrities,
social media. I employ content and textual analysis of magazines and
celebrity performances, and an online ethnography of multiple iterations
of the Internet phenomenon of the sad girl.
As mentioned above, the project focuses on three main sites—articles
about mental health and illness in two publications aimed at women and
girls (Cosmopolitan and Teen Vogue); female celebrities who have spoken
publicly about dealing with depression and anxiety (primarily Demi
Lovato33 and Selena Gomez); and socially mediated expressions of depres-
sion, anxiety, and general sadness online (sad girls on Tumblr and
Instagram, as well as the specic cases of Audrey Wollen, Sad Girls Y Qué,
Sad Girls Club, and My Therapist Says). In my analysis, I have looked for
specic mentions of depression, anxiety, and diagnoses like bipolar disor-
der, while also taking note of statements that convey related psychosocial
affects like vulnerability, sadness, and melancholia without directly naming
diagnoses. I have asked questions about the way in which depression and
anxiety are talked about; who gets to speak about it; what the solutions
F. THELANDERSSON

9
and responses presented are; and how these conversations relate to power/
knowledge structures, whether directly or implicitly.
In addition to Projansky’s “optimistic anti-racist queer readings” of
representations of girlhood I also work with Eve Kosofosky Sedgwick’s
calls for reparative, rather than paranoid, critical reading.34 For Sedgwick,
critical theory has for too long been invested in a “hermeneutics of suspi-
cion” which analyzes the world in a paranoid way that always aims to
uncover a negative or damaging truth.35 The problem with paranoid read-
ing is that it presumes sinister intentions behind the surface and that it
places ultimate faith in what exposing those intentions might do for the
greater good. Sedgwick proposes instead an understanding of paranoia as
“one kind of epistemological practice among other, alternative ones,” and
urges scholars to also engage in reparative readings.36 A reparative position
involves a “seeking of pleasure” and an openness to optimistic readings of
a text or situation.37 In relation to contemporary mental health discourses,
this means looking for potentially subversive or reparative aspects in por-
trayals of depression, anxiety, and other mental illness.
The emergence oFTwenTy-FirsT-cenTury sadness
Women’s affective states have a long history of being pathologized under
names like neurasthenia, hysteria, and schizophrenia.38 In culture, the sad
and mad woman has appeared as various popular gures: the Victorian
madwoman, the hysteric, the schizophrenic, and the Prozac-consuming
American woman of the 1990s, to name a few. In Chap. 2 I trace the lin-
eage of these gures since the early modern period up until today.
Historically, women’s sad experiences have been classied as patholo-
gies leading to institutionalization and connement. In the contemporary
moment, they tend to be medicalized within a biochemical discourse that
reverts to (deinstitutionalized) psychotropic drugs and psychotherapy as
solutions. In this way, the current pathologization of women’s sad experi-
ences takes place within a neoliberal framework that does not position
them as abject and (completely) other, but instead renders them intelligi-
ble within a larger culture of self-help in which the individual is responsi-
ble for her own wellbeing.39 In this framework, all ties between health and
structures of inequality are severed, and any attempts at politicizing wide-
spread ill health are thwarted. 21st Century Media and Female Mental
Health shows that this mode of thinking about mental health is dominant,
but not all-encompassing in contemporary popular culture. There are
1 INTRODUCTION

10
plenty of examples of a protable vulnerability that is shared to strengthen
brands’ authenticity, but there are also several sites where ties between
mental wellbeing and larger power structures are being made, most explic-
itly in Teen Vogue and among the sad girls on Instagram.
One of the arguments I make in this book is that the gure of the sad
girl emerged as an indirect response to a media culture that required
women in particular to be strong, empowered, and condent. The rst
example of this is the artist Lana del Rey and the splash she made when she
debuted with a homemade video for the song “Video Games” in late
2011. The video went viral and she became famous overnight, and when
her debut album Born to Die was released in January 2012 it topped the
charts in eleven countries. But alongside the hype and popularity came an
onslaught of criticism and vitriol from both Internet users and mainstream
media outlets like the New York Times.40 The music video for the song
“Video Games” is a mash-up of 1950s Hollywood aesthetics, boys on
skateboards, a drunk and stumbling woman being helped to a car, palm
trees, the iconic L.A. hotel Chateau Marmont and del Rey herself looking
sultry with plump lips and her hair made up in a 1960s beehive.41 The
song is ostensibly about a girl very much in love with a boy who likes to
play video games, and who gives her all to be with him, with the chorus
going “It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you / Everything I do / I tell you all
the time / Heaven is a place on Earth with you.” The song and video,
together with the following single “Born to Die” and the album with the
same title, emphasized submissiveness and a tendency towards self-
destructive behavior. These sentiments stood in stark contrast to the
refrain of self-empowerment that dominated pop at the time.42 One music
journalist described it as follows:
Nowhere else in mass culture have young people, especially women, been
allowed to feel so unvexed about their desires, even if those desires are con-
strained to the relatively supercial, glitter-sprayed longings of a Ke$ha
rager: ‘We’re taking control/We’ve got what we want/We do what
you don’t.’43
The problem with del Rey, argued the same journalist, is that she “sings
as a woman who doesn’t know what she wants,” which was why she
appeared as a provocation to some. NPR’s music critic Ann Powers argued
that del Rey’s “persona relies on classic femme fatale allure, but without
the usual “girl power“ update … So women nd her troubling; she
F. THELANDERSSON

11
embodies the worst part of being a girl.”44 In the pop cultural climate of
the time, del Rey’s passivity and sadness was upsetting in its turn away
from (post)feminist can-do spirit. Media studies scholar Catherine Vigier
provided the following analysis at the time:
One of the problems is that, after a decade in which women were told that
they had everything it took to get ahead, and that the playing-eld was
somehow level in our new, post-feminist world, it was disturbing to many to
see a woman recast herself as an old-fashioned male fantasy and to seemingly
embrace submissiveness, and to dress as if she were nostalgic for the days
before women’s liberation.45
For Vigier, one of the main draws of del Rey was that she spoke for the
women who felt left out of the empowerment feminism of the day and
gave “expression to some of the profound dissatisfactions that women
continue to feel.”46 This interpretation is similar to what artist Audrey
Wollen expressed a few years later when she proposed a “Sad Girl Theory”
to reconceptualize female sadness as a form of protest through images
posted on her Instagram account.47 For Wollen, women sharing photo-
graphs of themselves crying or otherwise publicly displaying their sadness
should not be seen as expressions of weakness, but should instead be inter-
preted as modes of dissent in a patriarchal world that requires women
to smile.
This is not to say that del Rey and Wollen were the inventors or origina-
tors of this kind of sad expression, rather they exist in the long lineage of
sad women (explored in Chap. 2). But they are examples of a kind of sad
aesthetic that emerged in the 2010s and very much also took shape online.
Zoe Alderton, who writes about the contemporary aesthetics of self-harm,
describes it as “a newer kind of ‘Sad’ Aesthetic [that] has come exclusively
from the internet generation and new modes of mass communication.”48
She locates this aesthetic as especially connected to the social media plat-
form Tumblr and the “Tumblr Teen Girl Aesthetic” which is “both pow-
erfully emotive and deeply ironic.”49 Important to note here is that the
girls associated with this kind of sad expression tend to be white and thin,
and the possibilities this position offer are thus limited (something I
explore more in Chap. 5).50
21st Century Media and Female Mental Health explores how this sad
aesthetic has spread from the lesser-known corners of the internet and into
popular culture at large. In addition to a higher presence of sad songs
1 INTRODUCTION

12
among the top charts,51 my research shows that there was an increase in
magazine coverage of depression/anxiety and celebrity confessions of liv-
ing with mental illness from 2015 and onwards. I am not arguing that
there was a straight line of causation or inuence from Internet subculture
to the mainstream, rather I want to call attention to a general turn to sad-
ness on multiple levels of popular culture.
This new visibility surrounding issues of mental illness takes multiple
forms. On the one hand there is an awareness of diagnoses and different
conditions in ways that seek to normalize issues as common and “just like
any other disease.” Discourses in this vein largely try to present depression
and anxiety in easily digestible and nonthreatening ways, following Akane
Kanai’s work on “affectively relatable” online selves that touch upon dif-
cult subjects but do so with self-deprecating humor that serves to defuse
the seriousness of the problems.52 These representations are found largely
in Cosmopolitan’s coverage of mental illness, among celebrities and micro-
celebrities, and in some of the more commercial “sad girl” accounts on
social media. This kind of representation of mental illness largely takes the
shape of a “protable vulnerability” that serves to show acceptance and
tolerance of weakness while keeping a distance/remaining unthreatening.
This vulnerability becomes protable in that it strengthens the authentic-
ity of a brand, something seen clearly in the celebrity health narrative of
Demi Lovato (explored in Chap. 4).
Another aspect of the heightened visibility of mental health is the
increased intimacy of celebrity and inuencer culture. Traditional celebri-
ties are becoming more ordinary and tend to open up more about their
personal lives to create and maintain strong connections with fans, while
“regular” people turn into microcelebrities by building intense and inti-
mate connections with followers.53 Disclosing a mental illness diagnosis
can be a successful way of building up these bonds and often serves to
strengthen brands based on authenticity. At the same time the media out-
lets that provide advice and where women have traditionally turned to for
support, like magazines, largely reach audiences via social media feeds that
are also lled with content from celebrities, inuencers, and peers. In this
way the various media spaces blend into each other and all function as
nodes of support.
But alongside examples of protable vulnerability are also more critical
accounts where mental wellbeing is presented as a more complex issue and
frequently connected to power structures and inequality. These accounts
are largely found in Teen Vogue, whose contemporary branding attempts
F. THELANDERSSON

13
to construct girls and young women as political subjects with agency, and
among the more radical sad girls on Instagram who tend to critique the
US mental health care system and the state of capitalism.54 This kind of sad
girl culture offers more spacious ways of feeling bad that include both a
systemic critique and direct support.
on Terminology, conTexTual speciFicaTions,
andinTersecTionaliTy
A note on terminology and the contextual specications of the book is
appropriate here. First, I largely use mental health and mental illness inter-
changeably throughout the book. This is partly due to a linguistic choice,
repeating “mental illness” over and over would become tedious. But it is
also a reection of the discourses I analyze, where the two terms are used
interchangeably to designate both “heathy” and “ill” aspects of the psyche.
Mental health awareness generally encompasses factors that are both
“good” and “bad” for a healthy mind, whereas mental illness awareness
tends to mean knowledge about specic diagnoses. There is a slippage
here, then, but it is largely inuenced by a slippage present in the popular
discourses examined, where denitions of what is exactly entailed by
“depression” and “anxiety” are often absent. This lack of clear denitions
is itself an aspect of the popular discourses, and in my analysis I ask about
what meanings are actually conveyed about what it means to be
“depressed,” “anxious,” or “bipolar.”
Second, this book focuses on media texts from the Anglo-American
world, with a primarily US perspective on discourses around mental health
and illness. I thus make no claims to account for non-Western debates
around these topics, even if a global perspective surely would add interest-
ing insights into how the psyche is conceived of in the contemporary
world, such an effort is far beyond the scope of this book.
Additionally, within the US-European context, the emphasis is, when it
comes to magazines and celebrities, on mainstream media discourse,
which tends to reect a largely white female demographic. In the world of
magazines, the assumed subject addressed by Cosmopolitan is a white one
in that race is not addressed in a majority of pieces. It looks a bit different
in Teen Vogue, where racism is a recurring topic and the higher rates of
depression among people of color are repeatedly acknowledged. Among
celebrities the majority of stars who have spoken out about diagnoses or
1 INTRODUCTION

14
traumas tend to be white or white-passing. And on social media, the sad
girl culture examined is largely made up of white subjects, with a few sig-
nicant exceptions. These are Sad Girls Y Qué, a Mexican group of young
women mobilizing the sad girl gure as a protest against machismo cul-
ture, and Sad Girls Club, an Instagram account and meet-up group that
explicitly focuses on women of color dealing with mental health issues.
In acknowledging the often-presumed whiteness of the subject
addressed in the media texts, I hope to avoid falling into the assumption
that depression and the like effects everyone the same and always looks the
same. The way mental illness is experienced is highly determined by one’s
immediate circumstances as well as family and cultural histories. There is a
rich body of scholarship on racial melancholia that connects histories of
colonialism, slavery, and genocide to the present, and denes “the affec-
tive life of racialized existence and the psychic impact of racism as a form
of loss and trauma.”55 Saidiya Hartman, for example, describes depression
as part of the “afterlife of slavery,” alongside “skewed life chances, limited
access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and
impoverishment.”56 Similarly, after the 2015 Charleston church massacre,
in which a white supremacist terrorist shot nine African Americans attend-
ing bible study, Claudia Rankine dened “the condition of black life” as
one of mourning.57 This line of thinking acknowledges the lived experi-
ence of belonging to an historically marginalized group, whose life pros-
pects are severely limited by ongoing and historical structural violence.
The experience of depression for a black subject in the US might be very
different than for a “white and middle- class subject for whom feeling bad
is frequently a mystery because it doesn’t t a life in which privilege and
comfort make things seem ne on the surface.”58 The narratives of mental
illness in the media discourses that this book examines largely belong to
the latter category here, where painful feelings are seen as a mystery solved
by the logic of biomedical diagnoses. I try to show how even that subject
and the pathologizations of her moods and behavior are socioculturally
bound up in particular power/knowledge relations (in Chap. 2, I attempt
to trace what that has looked like historically). But the focus here then is
predominantly on the mainstream conceptions of mental health that,
often without making it explicit, assumes a white and otherwise carefree
subject.
F. THELANDERSSON

15
Neoliberalism, Governmentality, andBiopolitics
It is also appropriate to dene some of the core theoretical concepts that
underlie my analysis. To start, my understanding of the contemporary cul-
tural, social, and economic moment is informed by critical thinkers who
dene today’s Western society as a neoliberal capitalist society. I adhere to
a broad denition of neoliberalism as the “political, economic, and social
arrangements within society that emphasize market relations, re-tasking
the role of the state, and individual responsibility.”59 The ubiquity of mar-
ket logics and the accompanying demand of the individual to fend for
herself in all stages of life is central to my use of the concept. Neoliberalism
reaches beyond economic and social policy and inuences the formation
of our subjectivities.
I follow scholars who have theorized neoliberalism through the
Foucauldian concept of governmentality.60 Governmentality refers to the
activities by which a state governs over its citizens. Importantly, within this
framework government is not understood simply as institutions of political
and economic policy, rather as “a continuum, which extends from political
government right through to forms of self-regulation.”61 Foucault refers
to these “forms of self-regulation” as “technologies of the self,” which are
central to the notion of governmentality.62 They are essential because they
denote the ways in which we come to relate to ourselves and make sense
of ourselves, and within Foucault’s theoretical framework they are closely
linked to systems of governance.
For Thomas Lemke, Foucault’s writings and lectures on governmental-
ity aimed “to show how the modern sovereign state and the modern
autonomous individual co-determine each other’s emergence.”63 That is,
to show that the development of subjectivity goes hand in hand with the
development of the state. The way we become subjects is inextricably
linked to the way the governing body of society exercises its control. So,
under a neoliberal system of governance, our subjectivities are structured
according to a neoliberal rationale. The extension of market logics into all
areas of society extends to the level of individuation, and encourages, or
demands, that individuals become entrepreneurial subjects with full
responsibility for their own lives.64 Within this logic, something like pov-
erty is not a circumstance with a negative inuence over the individual
beyond her control; instead, it is the task of the individual to rise above
such a circumstance and on her own create a life worth living.
1 INTRODUCTION

16
Biopolitics is another important Foucauldian concept that is closely
linked to the idea of governmentality. For Foucault, biopolitics is the man-
agement of the life of a population, of monitoring and controlling things
like health, birthrate, and longevity of a people.65 Starting in the eigh-
teenth century, political power stopped being exercised only in the giving
or taking of life, and became occupied with the wellbeing of the popula-
tion. Initially this concern arose from specic problems of illnesses, lack of
sanitation in towns, and accidents, but soon the management of life
became a way for state and police authorities to control and surveil its
subjects. Nikolas Rose writes, “from this moment on, politics would have
to address the vital processes of human existence: the size and quality of
the population; reproduction and human sexuality; conjugal, parental,
and familial relations; health and disease; birth and death.”66 One of the
most blatant examples of this exercise of power over life is the practice of
eugenics in the rst half of the twentieth century, which involved elaborate
strategies of reproductive control so as to secure a future “welfare of the
nation” based on a belief that some physical characteristics were superior
to others.67 But biopolitics also works in less agrant ways, and remains
integral to the exercise of power in the twenty-rst century.
In relation to neoliberalism, biopolitics becomes an important way to
think about the continued reach of authorities of power in regulating our
lives. What is remarkable with the neoliberal conguration is the visible
withdrawal of the state in terms of cuts to welfare programs and deregula-
tion of nancial markets, which seem to suggest that there is less gover-
nance over our lives. Several thinkers have shown that this is not the case,
that we instead are being governed in a “new” way, primarily by means of
self-regulation.68 The state (or whatever form the exercise of power takes)
is still invested in managing and controlling the life of the population but
has displaced the governing of its citizens from social institutions to the
individuals themselves. Today this is seen clearly in the ubiquity of self-
tracking and self-monitoring digital technologies like pregnancy apps and
devices like tbits, where users record their own activities, physical sensa-
tions, and mood changes. The information collected is automatically
shared with the corporation owning the app or digital platform, and fre-
quently also shared to users’ social media networks. This has given rise to
what scholars like Deborah Lupton call the “quantied self.69 This self is
imbued with an entrepreneurial spirit of constant evaluation and optimiza-
tion. The neoliberal subject, then, is “an ‘enterprising’ subject: a
F. THELANDERSSON

17
calculating, self-reexive, ‘economic’ subject; one that calculates about
itself and works upon itself in order to better itself.”70
Wendy Brown states that “neo-liberal subjects are controlled through
their freedom … because of neoliberalism’s moralization of the conse-
quences of this freedom.”71 Similarly, Lupton writes that “people are com-
pelled to make themselves central to their own lives when they take on the
ethical project of selfhood.”72 Working on oneself in neoliberal society is
not an act of self-indulgence but of virtue. We may be free to do whatever
we want but we are morally and ethically obliged to “care” for ourselves
not only for our own wellbeing, but for the wellbeing of the greater good.73
There is a connection here between the call for self-responsibilization
and the expert knowledge that guides these processes of self-work. The
various modes of self-governance outlined above are inuenced, or directly
formed, by certain kinds of professional expertise that are closely tied to
governments. The relation between expertise and government is a recip-
rocal one,74 where what is considered “good, healthy, normal, virtuous,
efcient or protable” is also an afrmation of the contemporary modes of
political governance.75 Notably, this relation is not one of all-pervasive
social control, but rather distributed into sometimes contradictory recom-
mendations for living. Rose and Peter Miller argue that the role of exper-
tise is to enact “assorted attempts at the calculated administration of
diverse aspects of conduct through countless, often competing, local tac-
tics of education, persuasion, inducement, management, incitement,
motivation and encouragement.”76 This expertise is doled out in ofcial
governmental programs as well as various types of “lifestyle media” such
as advice-giving in magazines and self-help books.
It is thus within this context of self-optimization and work on the self
that twenty-rst-century discourses of mental health and illness take shape.
Postfeminism andPopular Feminism
A note on the use of postfeminism and popular feminism is also needed.
The scholarly eld of feminist media studies, which I am in dialogue with,
has employed the term postfeminism to identify the role of feminism in
the Western media landscape of the 1990s and the early 2000s. In a much-
cited piece from 2007, Gill dened a postfeminist sensibility which perme-
ated media culture at the time. This was signied by a view of femininity
as “a bodily property; the shift from objectication to subjectication; an
emphasis upon self-surveillance, monitoring and self-discipline; a focus on
1 INTRODUCTION

18
individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of a makeover
paradigm; and a resurgence of ideas about natural sexual difference.”77
Gill makes the argument that the qualities privileged and emphasized
within a postfeminist sensibility ts remarkably well with the dictates of
twenty-rst-century neoliberalism, so much so that women are the ideal
neoliberal subjects, constantly called upon to work on and improve them-
selves so as to become good laboring subjects. Since then, Gill and others
have further developed the concept of a postfeminist sensibility, adding, as
mentioned above, that both postfeminism and neoliberalism emphasize
not only bodily transformation but also psychic improvement. Drawing
on Judith Butler’s notion of the “psychic life of power,” Gill and Christina
Scharff describe the psychic life of postfeminism and neoliberalism.78 The
notion of “psychic life” designates the central role of power in creating
and forming our subjectivities.79 For Gill and others what marks twenty-
rst- centur y media is an intense focus on the psychological and a “psy-
chologization of surveillance.”80 As previously mentioned, there are now
calls to not only work on the body but also the psyche, to approve one’s
self-esteem and condence. The postfeminist and neoliberal subject has to
continually work on not only its entrepreneurial skills, but its affects.
The theorization of postfeminism has, during the 2010s, been compli-
cated by the emergence of a very visible popular feminism in Western
media culture. The relatively new popularity of feminism does not, how-
ever, mean that a postfeminist sensibility is now absent from culture. Nor
that the messages aimed at women are now straightforwardly feminist in a
politically radical way. The feminism that is seen in mainstream media cul-
ture is one that sees visibility as an end goal in itself (naming something as
feminist becomes more important than working for actual change in laws
or policies) and is largely “brandable [and] commensurate with market
logics.”81 In relation to this popular feminism a postfeminist sensibility has
taken on a new and more subtle form, where feminism is not completely
repudiated but seen as obviously important and rearticulated in “purely
individual terms that stress choice, empowerment, and competition.”82
Orgad and Gill’s denition of a condence culture that presents individual
women’s work on their own condence as solutions to structural gender
inequalities is an apt example of this.
I use the term postfeminist throughout the book to designate this artic-
ulation of neoliberal logics in gendered ways, to signify a sensibility that
both repudiates feminist notions of structural change and embraces a hol-
low and individualized feminism.
F. THELANDERSSON

19
Feminist Approaches toAffect
Lastly, I want to acknowledge the feminist affect theoretical perspectives
that have inuenced my own thinking about negative affects like depres-
sion and anxiety, as individual, social, and political. Feminist scholars have
been interested in the relationships between affect, knowledge, and
power for a long time, captured succinctly in the second-wave feminist
slogan “the personal is political.” Underlying this concern have been
attempts to “interrogate the gendered nature of the reason/emotion
binary,” which “throughout the history of Western thought … has func-
tioned to exclude women (and other bodies outside the white, masculine
mainstream) from ‘legitimate’ knowledge production.”83 Elevating the
emotional has been a way of legitimizing and politicizing experiences/
knowledges that have traditionally been discounted on the grounds of
not being “reasonable.”
Feminist scholars have also been on the forefront of the “affective turn”
in academia, as it has moved away from “the text and discourse as key
theoretical touchstones” to recenter the body in scholarly/intellectual
thought.84 Scholars like Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich,
Sianne Ngai, and Sedgwick have stressed that affects have a place in the
public sphere, and that the public is likewise present in our emotional
lives.85 Importantly, these thinkers do not advocate privileging the per-
sonal over the public. Cvetkovich, for example, has argued that traditional
feminist theory has overemphasized the ability of personal and communal
healing practices to function as solutions to complex social and collective
problems.86 Feminist approaches within the affect theoretical framework
have instead analyzed the “complex imbrication” of the emotional and the
structural.87 Ahmed has argued that we look both at the “structure of feel-
ing”88 and the “feelings of structure,” suggesting that “feelings might be
how structures get under our skin.”89 Feminist affect theoretical approaches
thus offers a way to understand how our inner lives are inuenced by
power/knowledge structures, and vice versa.
This approach also echoes the inuential work of Arlie Russell
Hochschild who argued already in 1983 that emotions are managed and
disciplined according to particular “feeling rules” in both the public and
private (Gill and Kanai use this concept to dene the “feeling rules of neo-
liberalism,” which I use as an analytical tool throughout the book).90
Making a crucial connection to capitalism, she held that emotions could
be exploited for prot in the form of “emotional labor.” More recently
1 INTRODUCTION

20
emotions have been linked to the market in Eva Illouz’s work on “emo-
tional capitalism.”91 She argues that our economic relations have become
increasingly intimate and emotional, while our intimate lives have been
restructured in economic terms. Here, feelings are rationalized, measured,
and controlled.
Affect theory thus offers crucial perspectives for understanding how
our psychic lives are affected by and constituted through our socio- cultural
circumstances.
chapTer ouTline
After the introduction offered in this rst chapter, the second chapter
traces a brief history of how women’s mental health has been pathologized
in the American and European West since the start of the modern period.
It examines gures of sad and mad women, like the Victorian madwoman,
the hysteric, the schizophrenic, and the Prozac-consuming American
woman of the 1990s. It traces historical trends in diagnoses, from
nineteenth- century neurasthenia and hysteria to twentieth-century schizo-
phrenia and anorexia. Here I also try to account for the historical develop-
ment of the medical elds of psychology and psychiatry and how they have
related to contemporary gender conventions. Alongside this history, I
account for feminist interpretations of these various pathologizations. I
hope to show that mental illness diagnoses are neither completely discur-
sive (socially and linguistically constructed) nor xed 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.
The third chapter——“Mental Health in Magazines: Relatability and
Critique in Cosmopolitan and Teen Vogue”——looks at how the online edi-
tions of these two magazines covered depression, anxiety, and related top-
ics during the time period 2008-2018. It builds on an archive of more
than 250 Cosmopolitan articles and over 500 Teen Vogue pieces to cata-
logue the differences in style, voice, and representations around depres-
sion and mental health in the two outlets. Cosmopolitan’s coverage is
largely focused on being easygoing and relatable, with much of their cov-
erage taking a distanced and lighthearted approach to issues of mental
health. Teen Vogue generally takes a more serious approach to issues of
mental distress, shown in their adoption of the language of mental health
advocacy with frequent mentions of stigma and the importance of
F. THELANDERSSON

21
speaking out. The differences between the two are highlighted by looking
at how the two outlets covered the same celebrity events and study of the
antidepressant drug Paxil. I argue that the attitudes towards mental health
found in these two publications are representative of larger approaches,
where Cosmo’s tongue-in-cheek coverage exemplies a protable vulner-
ability that has become rmly established in popular media. Teen Vogue on
the other hand reects a critical and morally aware sad girl culture that
offers more spacious ways of feeling bad while acknowledging the role of
structural inequality in mental health.
The fourth chapter——“Celebrity Mental Health: Intimacy,
Ordinariness, and Repeated Self-Transformation”——examines celebri-
ties who have spoken out about their own struggles with mental illness
and explored themes of sadness and weakness in their work. The logic at
work in celebrity confessions is that when a famous person comes out and
reveals that they are suffering they communicate to fans that it is okay to
feel that way. The chapter focuses primarily on pop stars Demi Lovato and
Selena Gomez as representatives of traditional celebrities being open
about their mental health. It also briey discusses artist Lana del Rey’s sad
persona and her inuence on the music scene. Through these cases, I dis-
cuss the increasing ordinariness of celebrities, who now have to maintain
the relationship with their fans via myriad social media channels that put
excessive focus on intimacy and “realness,” a framework within which
being open about mental illness becomes an enhancing feature of an
“authentic” brand rather than something to be ashamed of.
Lovato’s celebrity health narrative shows how mental distress can be suc-
cessfully folded into a celebrity brand and enhance its market value, as they
have been able to make a literal prot off of work that utilizes the tragic
events in their life while reinforcing a neoliberal ethos of self-work and self-
transformation, exemplifying protable vulnerability. But this cannot be read
only through a cynical lens that highlights the protable elements of their
suffering, because in sharing their story fans who have been through similar
things are able to connect with and give support to each other. Gomez’s
health narrative can be read in a comparable way——she waited to share her
struggles until the cultural climate was conducive to framing her problems as
something that enhanced rather than detracted from her celebrity brand. But
at the same time, in the act of speaking publicly about her issues she also
opened up new spaces for talking about things like depression, anxiety, and
bipolar disorder. The analysis of these health narratives shows that protable
vulnerability and supportive conversations around mental distress exist in
tension with each other in the world of celebrity media.
1 INTRODUCTION

22
The fth chapter——“Social Media Sadness: Sad Girl Culture and
Radical Ways of Feeling Bad”——turns to social media platforms and
looks at the gure of the sad girl as she emerged online as an indirect
response to a popular culture overtly focused on happiness. It discusses
how she appeared on primarily Tumblr and Instagram, exploring the gen-
eral sad girl discourses on these platforms as well as some examples that
received extra attention. These include the artist Audrey Wollen and her
sad girl theory, the girl group Sad Girls Y Qué, the Instagram club Sad
Girls Club, the social media brand My Therapist Says, and prominent
Instagram accounts. Here I look at the critical and acritical tendencies
within the gure, acknowledging both the potentially subversive aspects
of the activist-oriented sad girls and the more commercialized versions of
popular sad girls. This chapter explores how Tumblr sad girls might be
seen as resting in sadness; how relatability is employed as a political strat-
egy by some Instagram sad girls; the ambivalence of normalization; and
the limits of using commercial social media platforms for meaningful social
action. The tension between a protable vulnerability and supportive
spaces is present also here, although the supportive element is dominant
in the peer-to-peer networks formed on these platforms.
The nal chapter is a conclusion that discusses how, across the three
sites, conversations around depression, anxiety, and general mental illness
have taken shape post-2008. By tying together the constructions of men-
tal health in magazines, among celebrities, and on social media, the con-
clusion highlights how a changing media landscape and neoliberal calls for
self-optimization have made way for a protable vulnerability that exists in
tension with more radical understandings of psychic wellbeing.
noTes
1. Eells, ”Billie Eilish and the Triumph of the Weird;” Frost, “Meghan Markle
Says She Sought Help Over Suicidal Thoughts;” Thorne, “HBO to Add
Mental Health Disclaimers in Front of Select Shows;” Young, “Prince
Harry says people should train ‘mind and body as one’ in video launching
mental health tool for military.”
2. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness; Davies, The happiness industry; Gill and
Orgad, “The Condence Cult(ure);” Orgad and Gill, Condence Culture.
3. Vogue.com, “Selena Gomez Gets Real About Anxiety.”
4. Pugachevsky, “27 Celebrities On Dealing With Depression And Bipolar
Disorder;” see Chap. 4.
F. THELANDERSSON

23
5. Kliegman, “2015: The Year Mental Illness Finally Got Some Respect on TV.”
6. See Chaps. 5 and 6.
7. Gill, “Postfeminist media culture;” Gill, “Post-postfeminism?;” Negra and
Tasker, Gendering the recession; Scharff, “The Psychic Life of Neoliberalism.”
8. Gill, “Postfeminist media culture;” Gill, “Culture and Subjectivity in
Neoliberal and Postfeminist Times;” McRobbie, The aftermath of femi-
nism; Ringrose and Walkerdine, “Regulating The Abject;” Scharff,
“Gender and neoliberalism.”
9. Gill, “The affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism;” Scharff,
“The Psychic Life of Neoliberalism.”
10. Banet-Weiser, Empowered; Dobson, Postfeminist Digital Cultures; Kanai,
“On not taking the self seriously;” Orgad and Gill, Condence Culture.
11. Dobson and Kanai, “From “can-do” girls to insecure and angry;” Orgad
and Gill, “Safety valves for mediated female rage in the #MeToo era;”
Wood, “Fuck the patriarchy.”
12. Dobson and Kanai, “From “can-do” girls to insecure and angry,” 1.
13. Orgad and Gill, “Safety valves for mediated female rage in the #MeToo
era,” 596.
14. Wood, “Fuck the patriarchy.”
15. Traister, Good and Mad.
16. Cooper, Eloquent Rage; Lorde, Sister outsider.
17. Orgad and Gill, Condence Culture.
18. Ibid, 4.
19. Ibid, 52.
20. McRobbie, Feminism and the politics of resilience.
21. Ibid, 43-44.
22. McRobbie, “Jackie Magazine,” 69.
23. Duffy, Remake, Remodel, 3.
24. Williams, Marxism and Literature.
25. Projansky, Spectacular Girls, 21.
26. Alderton, The aesthetics of self-harm, 106-107.
27. A piece aptly titled “All Alone in their White Girl Pain” circulated online
in August 2020, that made some poignant remarks about the acritical and
exclusionary aspects of white sad girls. Among these were that the sad girl
subject position was always only available for white girls to inhabit, and
that the pleasure that people like Lana del Rey derive from being victim-
ized is only truly pleasurable to those who have not actually been victim-
ized. Hip to Waste, “All Alone in Their White Girl Pain,” newsletter blog,
August 1, 2020, accessed June 28, 2022, https://hiptowaste.substack.
com/p/all- alone- in- their- white- girl- pain.
28. See “The People of Color and Mental Illness Photo Project,” website,
accessed June 23, 2022, https://www.diorvargas.com/photoproject; and
Sad Girls Club, website, accessed June 23, 2022, https://sadgirlsclub.org/.
1 INTRODUCTION

24
29. See Harvard, “Mental Health Muslim Communities;” Sinay, “Experiencing
Racism Makes You High Risk for Mental Health Issues;” McNamara,
“Legalizing Same Sex Marriage Lowered the Suicide Rates For Lesbian,
Gay and Bisexual Teens.”
30. Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS.”
31. Abad-Santos, “Meghan Markle’s honesty about suicidal thoughts in her
Oprah interview could help others;” Frost, “Meghan Markle Says She
Sought Help Over Suicidal Thoughts.”
32. Orgad and Gill, Condence Culture, McRobbie, Feminism and the politics
of resilience.
33. When I started this research, Lovato had not yet come out as non-binary,
and despite their current gender-queer identity, they were still a major g-
ure in American Girl culture in the rst two decades of the twenty-rst
century, which is why I have kept their celebrity health narrative as an
example of how mental illness is congured in media culture. Blistein,
“Demi Lovato Comes Out as Gender Non-Binary.”
34. Projansky, Spectacular Girls, 21; Sedgwick, Touching Feeling.
35. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 125.
36. Ibid, 128.
37. Ibid, 137
38. Appignanesi, Sad, mad and bad; Chesler, Women’s madness; Showalter, The
female malady.
39. Franssen, “The celebritization of self-care;” Johnson, “Managing Mr.
Monk;” Rose, Inventing our Selves.
40. Vigier, “The Meaning of Lana Del Rey,” 2.
41. Lana del Rey, “Video Games,” YouTube video, October 16, 2011, accessed
June 28, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE6wxDqdOV0.
42. One YouTube user even commented in March of 2020 that “This is revo-
lutionary. Now these [sic] kind of music is common thanks to Lana. Came
at a time when we had party music during school. This changed the entire
music scenario.” Alisa03, March, 2020, “comment on,” Lana del Rey,
“Video Games,” Youtube video, October 16, 2011, accessed June 28,
2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE6wxDqdOV0.
43. Schrodt, “Lana Del Rey’s Feminist Problem.”
44. Powers, “Lana Del Rey: Just Another Pop Star.”
45. Vigier, “The Meaning of Lana Del Rey,” 4.
46. Ibid, 3.
47. Watson, “How girls are nding empowerment through being sad online.”
48. Alderton, The aesthetics of self-harm, 64.
49. Ibid, 64.
50. Ibid; Farah, “All Alone in Their White Girl Pain.”
51. A 2018 study from researchers at the University of California at Irvine
analyzed 500,000 popular songs released in the UK between 1985 to
F. THELANDERSSON

25
2015 and classied them according to mood, showing that there was “a
clear downward trend in ‘happiness’ and ‘brightness’, as well as a slight
upward trend in ‘sadness,’” indicating that mainstream music has become
statistically sadder. Interiano etal, “Musical trends and predictability of
success in contemporary songs in and out of the top charts.”
52. Kanai, “Girlfriendship and sameness;” Kanai, “The best friend, the boy-
friend, other girls, hot guys, and creeps;” Kanai, Gender and Relatability
in Digital Culture.
53. Gamson, “The Unwatched Life Is Not Worth Living;” Marwick and boyd,
“To see and be seen;” Marwick, “Instafame: Luxury seles in the attention
economy.”
54. Coulter and Moruzi, “Woke Girls;” see Chap. 5.
55. Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling, 116; Cheng, The Melancholy of
Race; Eng and Han, “Dialogue on Racial Melancholia;” Holland, Raising
the Dead; Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia; Khanna, Dark Continents;
Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down.”
56. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 6; see also Cvetkovich, “Depression is
ordinary.”
57. Rankine, “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning.”
58. Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling, 115.
59. Springer, Birch and MacLeavy, The handbook of neoliberalism, 2.
60. Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy;” Barry,
Osborne, and Rose, Foucault and political reason; Cruikshank, “Revolutions
within: self-government and self-esteem;” Lemke, “The birth of bio-
politics;” Lewis, “Governmentality at work in shaping a critical geographi-
cal politics;” Rose, Powers of Freedom.
61. Lemke, “The birth of bio-politics,” 201.
62. Foucault, Discipline and punish; Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics.
63. Lemke, “The birth of bio-politics,” 191.
64. Ibid, 201.
65. Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 73.
66. Rose, The politics of life itself, 53.
67. Ibid, 54.
68. Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy;” Cruikshank,
“Revolutions within: self-government and self-esteem;” Foucault, The
Birth of Biopolitics; Lemke, “The birth of bio-politics;” Rose, Inventing
our Selves; Rose, Powers of Freedom; Rose, The politics of life itself.
69. Lupton, The Quantied Self.
70. Du Gay, Consumption and identity at work, 124.
71. Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” 5, italiciza-
tion in original.
72. Lupton, The Quantied Self, 102.
1 INTRODUCTION

26
73. Barbara Cruikshank’s (1996) study of the self-esteem movement of the
1980s and 1990s provides a poignant and quite literal example of how the
individual becomes accountable for the welfare of an entire society. In
1983 the state of California established the “Task Force to Promote Self-
Esteem and Social and Personal Responsibility,” marketed not only as an
attempt at making people feel better about themselves, but also as a solu-
tion to social problems like poverty, crime, and gender inequality. Claiming
to be a “social revolution,” the movement took aim not at capitalism,
patriarchy, or white supremacy, but at “the order of the self and the way we
govern our selves.” In this way, problems like unemployment, discrimina-
tion, and systemic violence are not to be solved by changes to social-
structural factors, but by reforming citizens on an individual-subjective
level. In a neoliberal society, then, the individual’s self is not just her own,
but part of, and in direct causality/correlation with the social body/good.
Cruikshank articulates it succinctly when she says: “The line between sub-
jectivity and subjection is crossed when I subject my self, when I align my
personal goals with those set out by reformers … according to some notion
of the social good.” Cruikshank, “Revolutions within,” 213, 235.
74. Greene and Breshears, “Biopolitical Media,” 191.
75. Rose and Miller, “Political power beyond the State,” 175.
76. Ibid, 175.
77. Gill, “Postfeminist media culture,” 147.
78. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power;
79. Scharff, “The Psychic Life of Neoliberalism,” 111.
80. Gill and Elias, ”Beauty surveillance,” 16; Gill, “Postfeminist media cul-
ture;” Gill, “Culture and Subjectivity in Neoliberal and Postfeminist
Times;” Gill, “The affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism.”
81. Banet-Weiser, Empowered, 13.
82. Orgad and Gill, Condence Culture, 7-8.
83. Pedwell and Whitehead, “Affecting feminism,” 119.
84. Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 9.
85. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion; Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness;
Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City; Berlant, The
Female Complaint; Cvetkovich, An archive of feeling; Ngai, Ugly Feelings;
Sedgwick, Touching Feeling.
86. Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings.
87. Pedwell and Whitehead, “Affecting feminism,” 121.
88. Williams, Marxism and Literature.
89. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 216; see also Ahmed, The Cultural
Politics of Emotion.
90. Hochschild, The Managed Heart; Gill and Kanai, ”Mediating Neoliberal
Capitalism.”
91. Illouz, Cold Intimacies.
F. THELANDERSSON

27
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Variety, October 10, 2019. https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/hbo- mental-
health- awareness- banner- 1203365233/.
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NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 2018.
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http://diorvargas.com/poc- mental- illness/.
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and the Choices Facing Young Women Today.” Zeteo: The Journal of
Interdisciplinary Writing, no. Fall (2012): 1–16.
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Changed Everything.” Vogue.Com, March 16, 2017. https://www.vogue.
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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
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F. THELANDERSSON

33
CHAPTER 2
A Historical Lineage ofSad andMad Women
Women’s affective states have a long history of being pathologized under
names like neurasthenia, hysteria, and schizophrenia.1 In culture, the sad
and mad woman has appeared as various popular gures: the Victorian
madwoman, the hysteric, the schizophrenic, and the Prozac-consuming
American woman of the 1990s, to name a few. The question of how spe-
cic pathologizations relate to contemporary gender relations runs
through all of these iterations of mad and sad women. Some feminist
scholars have argued that denitions of mental illness have been directly
linked to conventional understandings of femininity and masculinity, and
that any norm violation has been understood as madness.2 And others
have pointed to the biological reactions of some historical patients to
highlight the “realness” of their symptoms.3
In this chapter I trace a brief history of how women’s mental health has
been pathologized in the American and European West. I hope to show
that mental illness diagnoses are neither completely discursive (socially and
linguistically constructed) nor xed 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.
In charting this brief history I draw heavily on scholars like Elaine
Showalter and Lisa Appignanesi who mark the turn from the eighteen to
the nineteenth century (1700 to 1800) as the start of the modern concep-
tion of mental illness and health in distinctively gendered ways.4 This turn
of the century is signicant for multiple reasons, one of them of course
© The Author(s) 2023
F. Thelandersson, 21st Century Media and Female Mental Health,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16756-0_2

34
being the dawn of Enlightenment ideas and the birth of the human sci-
ences that introduced new ways of organizing the world and knowledge
about it. The decades around the French revolution marks an epistemic
shift in medicines, sciences, and penitentiary systems of the West.
Here I follow Foucault’s conceptualization of the epistemological shift
of this turn of the century, which when it came to penitentiary systems,
involved a move from punishing the body of the criminal to disciplining
the soul.5 According to Foucault, the change in the judicial system from
publicly torturing its criminals to conning them with the purpose of
rehabilitating or “curing” them, only had the appearance of being more
humane. The control exercised over the individual through the enactment
of disciplinary practices is just as efcient, if not more so, than the control
of the body, because it initiates a deeper and more long-lasting grip on the
soul. When self-discipline has been properly internalized (supposedly in a
successful process of rehabilitation), the powers that be have a hold on the
individual, who will adjust his behavior in accordance to what best suits
the dominant power structures. The concepts of governmentality and bio-
politics that were developed later in Foucault’s career build on these analy-
ses of penitentiary systems. Governmentality furthers our understanding
of how the internalization of discipline works and takes hold of the indi-
vidual at the level of subject formation. In relation to mental health and
illness, governmentality allows us to think about how the social/political
affects the organization of our psyches.
Foucault also delineates this shift from “outwardly” to inwardly disci-
pline in relation to sexuality and madness. In broad strokes, what is
described here is how views and conceptualizations of the criminal, the
mad, and the abnormal came to be constructed within the “new” human
sciences in post-Enlightenment Europe.6 A “medical gaze” was being
established in the new medical clinics, and the mad were to be not just
managed but also understood.7 Crucial to this was the establishment of a
rm binary between reason and unreason, civilized and uncivilized. The
poles in this binary were presented as objectively true, free of any agendas.
Part of this new knowledge regime was the establishment of sciences that
“uncovered” already existing truths. What Foucault so crucially showed
was that these new epistemologies were not simple discoveries of a rm
and already existing order of things, but were in themselves acts of order-
ing things.
In regard to psychology and psychiatry this meant the establishment of
a eld of knowledge which could display an ultimate picture of how the
F. THELANDERSSON

35
psyche functions and subsequently prescribe it treatments to cure or better
its makeup. But looking at the history of these disciplines, it quickly
becomes clear that the truth that it has presented as absolute has contin-
gently changed with contemporary power structures.
The VicTorian MadwoMan
One of the most signicant changes brought on by the “new” epistemol-
ogy of the psyche at the turn of the century was the move from the lunatic-
as- animal to the lunatic-as-human, from nonperson to person. Where the
mad had previously been seen as “unfeeling brutes, ferocious animals that
needed to be kept in check with chains,” they were now regarded as sick
human beings who might be returned to sanity under the correct care.8
This shift affected both popular imagination and actual practices of car-
ing for the mentally ill. As a result of this ideological change English social
reformers began to build asylums “in which paternal surveillance and reli-
gious ideals replaced physical coercion, fear and force.”9 The attitude
toward, and treatment of, the mentally ill thus went from being one of
sensational disgust to protective pity. Just as the criminal justice system
underwent an overhaul from public punishments like torture and execu-
tions to “sophisticated” retributions aimed at rehabilitation, so the psychi-
atric establishment went from shunning the mad as denite outcasts to
treating them as patients in need and in hope of saving.
Importantly, Showalter positions this shift next to another ideological
change, when “the dialectic of reason and unreason took on specically
sexual meanings, and … the symbolic gender of the insane person shifted
from male to female.”10 Reason became synonymous with men and mas-
culinity and unreason with women and femininity. In the move toward less
violent and more reparative care of the mentally ill, the subject in need of
caring connement became primarily female, and the treatment of her was
in the hands of men and male doctors. In this way, the shift in psychiatric
care was one of many arenas in which rationality became associated with
men and irrationality with women. It was the rationally sound mind that
had the capacity to control and cure the irrationally mad one.
Showalter describes the change in the symbolic conceptualization of
the lunatic in the eighteenth century: “in the course of the century … the
appealing madwoman gradually displaced the repulsive madman, both as
a prototype of the conned lunatic and as a cultural icon.”11 Showalter
illustrates this change in cultural perception by showcasing two statues of
2 A HISTORICAL LINEAGE OF SAD AND MAD WOMEN

36
madmen that had represented the gure of lunacy from the seventeenth
century on, but were removed from the public by the early nineteenth
century. Caius Gabriel Cibber’s statues “Raving Madness” and
“Melancholy Madness” (both made in 1677), depicted two men in the
nude, half-lying on the ground, one aggravated and bound in shackles and
the other in an infantilized position of weakness. The statues were placed
at the entrance of the Bethlem (known as Bedlam) Hospital in London,
one of the rst and most notorious asylums in England. These statues
were the most famous representations of madness at the time. Showalter
describes them as marking “the lunatic’s entrance into the netherworld of
the insane.”12 But in 1815 the statues in front of Bedlam were replaced by
gures of women, representing “a youthful, beautiful, female insanity.”13
From now on, the representation of madness “was becoming feminized
and tamed, no longer wild, raving and dangerous, but pathetic.”14 The
popular image of psychic ills was no longer that of a madman, but of a
madwoman.
One part of this shift was the prevalence of stories of frail women being
mistreated in asylums, which reached the public and changed the opinion
about the treatment of the mad toward the end of the eighteenth century,
inspiring legal and institutional reforms.15 For example, Showalter recounts
the story of a Quaker widow who died under inexplicable circumstances in
the York asylum, resulting in the ofcial outrage of a wealthy philanthro-
pist who started the York retreat, “an asylum that pioneered the humane
care of the insane.”16 This illustration implies that the victimized mad-
women who inspired public concern belonged primarily to the upper
middle class. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the abuse of the wealthy attracted
more attention than the mistreatment of the ostracized poor. But in accor-
dance with the newfound rational value of human life, the penniless were
not shut out from the compassionate treatment of the mad, they were just
carefully segregated within the institutions.
Patients were geographically separated within the asylum based on gen-
der and class. The intellectual rehabilitation activities created for the
patients were also divided by class, with the richer clientele being treated
to lectures by local experts on poetry and biology, while the “paupers”
were left to lecture each other.17 Class structures were thus deliberately
reproduced down to a tangible and material level. The insane of all classes
could be cured, but no illusions of social mobility were allowed to take
hold. In accordance with what Showalter calls “psychiatric Darwinism,”
which appointed biological and genetic predispositions as causes of mental
F. THELANDERSSON

37
illness, the notion that mental health could correspond to socioeconomic
status was completely ignored.
One of the most popular diagnoses during the Victorian era was also
closely tied to class. Neurasthenia, coined in 1869 by George M.Beard,
referred to “the morbid condition of the exhaustion of the nervous sys-
tem” and grew out of the “American way of life, with its race for money
and power, its excessive pursuit of capital and technological progress.”18 It
was often middle-class women who dared to pursue “masculine” activities
like intellectual thinking who received the diagnosis, which followed an
idea of the nervous system as possessing a nite amount of nervous energy
that could more easily be depleted than replenished. The demands of the
new world could easily exhaust women’s frail nerves and the cure pre-
scribed was often a totalizing rest that urged the patient to abstain from all
activity, exercise, and work. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s now classic novel
The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) depicts the experience of fullling such a
cure, and exemplies how the very rest ordained to calm the nerves could
be what furthers the patient’s descent into madness.
Socially mobile middle-class women thus found themselves in a double
bind, where the culture at large championed dynamism and speed, but
demanded that women comply and acquiesce. As a response to these con-
tradictions, women frequently developed “nervous troubles which the
doctors then linked to their specically female functions rather than to the
overall conditions of their lives.”19
Ophelia, Crazy Jane, andLucia
In Victorian England the madwoman was culturally and artistically repre-
sented and perpetuated in three major forms: as “the suicidal Ophelia, the
sentimental Crazy Jane, and the violent Lucia.”20 Ophelia, the love- interest
of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “goes mad” and drowns herself after nding out
that her potential husband has killed her father. Showalter describes the
two other gures as derivations of Ophelia. Crazy Jane was the recurring
ctional gure of a penniless maid who “goes mad” when her lover leaves
her. She was “a touching image of feminine vulnerability and a attering
reminder of female dependence upon male affection.”21 If Crazy Jane rep-
resented an unthreatening female madness, a mostly passive yearning for
love gone wrong, Lucia or Lucy was her vicious antonym that embodied
“female sexuality as insane violence against men.”22 Originating from
Walter Scott’s novel The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), Lucy had had to
2 A HISTORICAL LINEAGE OF SAD AND MAD WOMEN

38
give up on the man she loved to marry another, and on the wedding night
she “goes mad” and brutally murders her new husband. Lucy’s story
became a wildly popular theme in nineteenth-century opera, coming to
represent a female ight from the shackles of contemporary femininity.
The violent madness she ed into was seen by some feminists as an empow-
ering moment that the female opera-goer could experience indirectly, thus
herself feeling a sense of liberation from her conned everyday existence.
The idea that a ctional female character gone mad could function as a
moment of empowering identication for the contemporary woman
appears in multiple feminist readings of women and madness in the cul-
tural imaginary. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the
Attic is perhaps the most famous work to argue such a stance. Referencing
Mr Rochester’s wife who is hidden away in the attic in Jane Eyre, Gilbert
and Gubar interpreted her as “the author’s double, an image of her own
anxiety and rage” against patriarchy.23
Gilbert and Gubar dened a female literary tradition in nineteenth-
century writing and discerned a recurring theme of psychological ailments
across genres and geographical locations. Some of the recurring tropes
were images of “enclosure and escape, fantasies in which maddened dou-
bles functioned as asocial surrogates for docile selves, metaphors of physi-
cal discomfort manifested in frozen landscapes and ery interiors … along
with obsessive depictions of diseases like anorexia, agoraphobia, and claus-
trophobia.”24 Rather than reading this as a simple reection of the reality
of female lives at the time, Gilbert and Gubar see the narratives of madness
as ways in which the authors could symbolically act out a refusal of patri-
archal norms. The character on the page functioned as the author’s dou-
ble, enabling her to express dissatisfaction and rage at the conventions she
had limited capacities to protest in everyday life.
Gilbert and Gubar’s text has taken an almost canonical position in femi-
nist literary scholarship, inspiring numerous analyses of female narratives
of madness as radically empowering. In this framework female “madness
signied anger and therefore, by extension, protest.”25 But it has also
inspired critiques such as Marta Caminero-Santangelo’s The Madwoman
Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity is Not Subversive.
Caminero-Santangelo shows that the gloried gure of the madwoman,
whether she’s fragile and in need of saving or self-destructively and out-
wardly violent, is almost always white. The privilege of adopting a “mad”
persona to protest a patriarchal structure is primarily awarded to white,
middle-class women. In response to countless feminist readings of white
F. THELANDERSSON

39
women’s stories, she brings in works by women of color writers like Toni
Morrison, Helena Maria Viramontes, and Cristina García to diversify the
analysis of “madness-narratives.”26
Drawing on Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved,
Caminero-Santangelo argues that madness, rather than being subversive,
may actually be seen as a capitulation to an oppressive hegemony. The act
of “going mad” might function as a rebellious “giving up” on the expecta-
tions placed upon you by a male-dominated world for the white Bourgeois
subject. But for the nonwhite subject, “going mad” is not a refusal of
outside expectations, it is a fulllment of them. For the protagonists in
Morrison’s novels, “madness consists not of subversion but rather of sur-
render to the representations of others; madness constitutes the inability
to construct a counternarrative of any sort.”27 This racial bias can be seen
in the contemporary representations of mental illness as well, where the
subject who speaks openly about her troubles tends to be white and mid-
dle or upper class, and posits some level of respectability.
The French hysTeric aTThesalpêTrière
In Paris in the early nineteenth century, the physician Philippe Pinel
opened the Salpêtrière hospital “as an asylum in the modern sense, whose
rst principle was the treatment of madness.”28 The mad were not only to
be conned or handled, but also to be understood and taken care of,
which was a novel approach at the time.
Pinel himself has been given almost cult-like status in the history of
(French) psychiatry due to his role after the Revolution in unchaining
“the lunatics at the Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière, a politically symbolic act
like the freeing of the prisoners in the Bastille.”29 He is shown in Tony
Robert-Fleury’s painting “Pinel Freeing the Insane” (1876) which depicts
multiple madwomen being unshackled under the oversight of Pinel. This
painting represents “the turning point … which Pinel is said to have
effected in the mythology of madness.”30 The painting hung in the lecture
hall of the Salpêtrière where Jean-Martin Charcot conducted his now infa-
mous public lectures on hysteria. During the winter of 1885–1886
Sigmund Freud attended these lectures and in writing about them men-
tioned the painting, describing it as a reminder of the revolutionary aspects
of treating the mentally ill.31 The anecdote of this one art piece illustrates
not only the inuence of Pinel, but also the far-reaching ambitions of the
new humane psychiatry or “moral therapy.” Like the change in the penal
2 A HISTORICAL LINEAGE OF SAD AND MAD WOMEN

40
system from physical punishment to mental discipline, the mad were to be
freed from the status of prisoners and become patients possible to cure.
Showalter’s reading of “Pinel Freeing the Insane” calls out the gen-
dered nature of the operation—men representing the voice of reason, able
to free and help the irrational and helpless madwomen. This is the same
mechanism as in the shift in England from the lunatic being exemplied
by a repulsive man to a victimized woman. The new lunatic was a hysteric
woman who could be cured by a male doctor. Under the guise of a more
humane and rational approach to the mad, a new epistemology of mad-
ness was established.
At the Salpêtrière the methods by which this new body of knowledge
was “uncovered” was particularly interesting because its main protago-
nist—neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot—made use of visual materials and
photography to establish the bulk of his scholarship. The role of visual
performance at the Salpêtrière was exemplied in Charcot’s weekly public
lectures in which he hypnotized patients in front of an audience to illus-
trate the different phases of hysteria, and in the rigorous photographic
documentation of his work. He even had a photographer set up residency
in the hospital, complete with a studio to capture the attacks of the hyster-
ics.32 In this way the notion of hysteria was from the beginning an extremely
mediated one, it existed in its purest form only in front of an audience or
a camera.
Hysteria: AFemale Ailment
Hysteria is one of the psychological ailments most connected to the female
gender in the Western cultural imaginary. The Salpêtrière had a special
wing for male hysterics, but this fact has not survived in the popular imagi-
nation, and its male manifestation was largely reconceptualized as shell
shock after World War I.33 The word hysteria is even derived from the
Greek and Latin word for uterus or womb, reecting the long-held notion
that it was caused by the female reproductive organs.34 Georges Didi-
Huberman suggests that hysteria (in the nineteenth century) was the
symptom “of being a woman.”35 He recounts how Freud, in 1888,
described hysteria as a “bête noire”—a thing that one highly dislikes, is
even disgusted by; it “represented a great fear for everyone.”36 These were
the sentiments that fueled the male doctors’ studies of hysteria, and they
reveal a simultaneous fear, disgust, and fascination with not only the dis-
ease, but also the entire female reproduction system. Didi-Huberman
F. THELANDERSSON

41
explains: “The bête noire was a secret and at the same time an excess. The
bête noire was a dirty trick of feminine desire, its most shameful part …
Hysteria almost never stopped calling the feminine guilty.”37 Didi-
Huberman thus connects hysteria to the very denition of femininity, sug-
gesting that the diagnosis itself was part of male fear of female sexuality.
Charcot’s major contribution was a psychological theory of hysteria,
which held that the disease was caused by emotion, but manifested itself
in actual physical symptoms. He ‘proved’, “through careful observation,
physical examination, and the use of hypnosis … that hysterical symp-
toms … were genuine, and not under the conscious control of the
patient.”38
Didi-Huberman delineates how Charcot took the multiple expressions
of hysteria, such as “spasms, convulsions, blackouts, semblances of epi-
lepsy, catalepsies, ecstasies, comas, lethargies, deliria,” assigned them an
order and combined them into “a general type that can be called ‘the great
hysterical attack’.”39 He dened four stages of this attack: “the epileptoid
phase,” which resembled an epileptic seizure; “clownism,” which involved
exaggerated contortions; “attitudes passionnelles,” in which the patient
reenacted events and emotions from her life; and “delirium,” when the
patient starts hallucinating and talk incoherently.40
The stages of the complete attack were displayed in Charcot’s public
lectures, in which he brought in a patient, hypnotized her, and simulated
the various phases for the audience to see. These lectures were attended by
a diverse collection of people, not only medical students but authors, jour-
nalists, actors, and socialites. One of the recurring patients was Blanche
Wittman, who was particularly good at displaying the various phases of the
attack. She gained celebrity status as one of Charcot’s “star hysterics.”41
There was a performative element in these displays, but to what degree the
patients consciously emulated the movements that were expected of them
is unclear. Showalter points out that the patients were surrounded by
images of how hysterical attacks were supposed to play out, which inu-
enced their performance under hypnosis.
The Role ofPhotography
At the time of Charcot’s glory days at the Salpêtrière photography was
making its entrance on the world scene as the true depicter of “objective
reality.” Didi-Huberman writes that photography “always says more than
the best description; and, where medicine is concerned, it seemed to fulll
2 A HISTORICAL LINEAGE OF SAD AND MAD WOMEN

42
the very ideal of the ‘Observation’.”42 This trust in the medium made pho-
tography “the paradigm of the scientist’s ‘true retina’” during the nine-
teenth century.43 To photographically record the research on hysteria that
Charcot was undertaking was thus an obvious decision. Through photog-
raphy the essence of hysteria was to be documented and categorized, to be
made part of a proper science.
One of the (many) things about this that seem remarkable today is the
way this documentation took place. For example, the photographic tech-
nology of the time was not sophisticated enough to snap an image imme-
diately, meaning that the patients had to hold the pose that displayed their
hysteric symptoms for the entirety of the exposure time, which could be
several minutes long.44
The photographs of Charcot’s patients were compiled into three vol-
umes of a book titled Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière
(Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière) (1875-1880).45 The star
patient of the Iconography was Augustine, a 15-year-old girl who had had
her rst hysterical attack at age 13, after being raped by her employer who
was also her mother’s lover.46
Augustine appears in multiple photographs in the Iconography, dis-
playing all the stages of the hysterical attack, as well as variations on the
expressions of each phase (see Fig.2.1). Showalter describes Augustine as
the perfect hysteric for Charcot’s methods. Emphasizing the performative
aspects of the photographic documentation, she states that “among her
gifts was her ability to time and divide her hysterical performances into
scenes, acts, tableaux, and intermissions, to perform on cue and on sched-
ule with the click of the camera.”47
If the madwoman in England during the nineteenth century was
embodied by Ophelia and Crazy Jane, in France she was represented by
Charcot’s hysterics at the Salpêtrière, among them Augustine. In one
sense Ophelia and Augustine were fundamentally different—the former
being ctional and the latter an actual young woman sent to Charcot for
treatment. But the sensational nature of Augustine’s case made her more
of a cultural gure than an individual person. She was and is the prime
example of nineteenth-century hysteria, an icon of this stage in the
“mythology of madness.” This is probably why her case has been studied
so frequently by feminist scholars, many reading it as a male doctor manip-
ulating a young woman to perform symptoms to support his theories,48
and others as a complex mix of “real” and made-up symptoms.49
F. THELANDERSSON

43
Fig. 2.1 Augustine
displaying one stage of
the hysteric attack,
Iconographie
photographique de la
Salpêtrière.
Feminism andHysteria
Showalter’s stance on the male inuence on hysterics has been critiqued as
overtly simplistic by scholars like Elizabeth A. Wilson, who calls out
Showalter for ignoring the biological aspects of “madwomen.” Wilson
calls Showalter’s analysis of hysteria an example of “the manner in which a
retreat from biology became naturalized early in the feminist interest in
hysteria.”50 Describing Showalter’s analysis of Charcot’s treatment of hys-
teria as a simple suppression of female resistance, Wilson points out that
some of the physical ailments suffered by the hysterics are too complex to
be dismissed as socially constructed symptoms. Wilson focuses on an event
in which Augustine temporarily lost the ability to see color, instead seeing
2 A HISTORICAL LINEAGE OF SAD AND MAD WOMEN

44
everything in black and white. Showalter’s analysis argues that this occur-
rence was a result of Charcot’s sensationalist photographic methods,
which nally “took its toll on her psyche.”51 Wilson counters this conclu-
sion by asking “what kind of biological material … stops processing color
under the sway of a photographic seduction? Why is the astonishment of
Augustine’s symptom attributed only to Charcot and not also to the
remarkable, hysterical vicissitudes of Augustine’s eyes and brain?”52
A photograph from the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière
shows Augustine’s body, stiff as a board, suspended between two chairs
that support only her head and feet.53 Such imagery makes it hard to dis-
miss the biological aspects of hysteria. Instances like this, where hysteria
contorts the body into unimaginable poses, warrant examination of the
physiological as well as psychological functions involved.
But perhaps it is the assumption of a clear differentiation between the
biological and the social that contributes to both of these readings. The
fact that Augustine and the other hysterics developed physiological symp-
toms does not have to be read as an afrmation of the “reality” of their
hysterias, but rather as signs of the complex interplay between mental and
physical functions. Within an affect theoretical framework, we might
instead understand the hysterical reactions as examples of how the social
(language-based and discursive) impacts us at the level of our biological
responses.
The BirTh oFpsychoanalysis
The hysterics at the Salpêtrière often shared a sexually traumatized past
and lived a highly sexually charged present. Charcot did not focus explic-
itly on this aspect of the disorder, but his most famous student, Freud,
tried to understand the sexual genesis of the condition and placed con-
icted sexuality at the root of severe illness.54 Inspired by Charcot, Freud’s
early case histories share many similarities with the hysterics of the
Salpêtrière. But whereas Charcot did not listen to what the female patients
had to say and favored experimental treatment with hypnosis, pressure
techniques, and drugs, Freud paid attention to how they themselves talked
about their afictions.55 Freud and his mentor Josef Breuer pioneered the
psychoanalytic treatment of hysteria with the case of Anna O.With her,
dialogue took the place of observation. Instead of detached examination
Breuer and Freud talked directly to the hysteric. They concluded that
Anna O’s hysterical symptoms were reactions to her oppressive,
F. THELANDERSSON

45
traditional, upbringing and lack of intellectual stimulation. The cure that
Breuer prescribed was daily talking and listening, an early form of
psychoanalysis.56
Breuer and Freud thus placed the cause of hysteria more in social cir-
cumstances than in biological predisposition. Showalter writes that they
appeared “to lay the groundwork for a culturally aware therapy that took
women’s words and women’s lives seriously, that respected the aspirations
of New Women, and that allowed women a say in the management of
hysterical symptoms.”57 It seemed that the introduction of talk-based
therapy allowed women who suffered hysteric symptoms to nally speak
for themselves and articulate their own thoughts and emotions.
With Charcot the unconscious began to be theorized, and with Freud
and his contemporaries at the turn of the twentieth century it took on “a
key role in understanding both madness and ordinary everyday behav-
iour,” restructuring the way we understand the human psyche and subjec-
tivity.58 With the advent of psychoanalysis, a language of psychosexuality
was established at a time when sexuality became increasingly important in
Western lives. One’s sexuality was a key indicator of the kind of person one
was, normal or perverted, sane or mad. And as Foucault has shown, this
organizing principle of subjectivity often involved a problematization of
the sexuality of women, homosexuals, and children.59 Ideas about sexual
repression, the unconscious and the family were circulating among several
scholars in the early days of the twentieth century, but “what Freud gradu-
ally and magnicently added was a narrative and theories which provided
pattern, motive forces and surprising explanations that did away with mor-
alizing punishments and liberated sexuality.”60 For Freud, contemporary
sexual morality, lack of libidinal satisfaction and ignorance about sex, pro-
duced anxiety and illness. The problem, in other words, was the repressing
mores of society rather than inherent vices. Freud also crucially showed
that conicts of sexuality in childhood not only shaped those who suffered
enough to nd their way to the couch of a psychoanalyst, but also affected
all individuals, even the presumably “healthy” ones.61
The cultural image of the madwoman changed as well. The upper
middle- class or wealthy woman who was sent to (or voluntarily visited) the
psychoanalytic clinic was very different from the working-class woman
interned at the Salpêtrière. Anna O. came from a wealthy, Orthodox
Jewish, family. Her brother was sent off to university while the intellectu-
ally gifted Anna had to stay home and tend to domestic chores. Several of
Freud’s patients at the time had similar backgrounds and intellectual
2 A HISTORICAL LINEAGE OF SAD AND MAD WOMEN

46
abilities. His and Breuer’s theory was that it was the culture which con-
ned these women to the boredom of domestic life that caused their hys-
teria. Within this framework the hysteric was not a fascinatingly repulsive
and incontrollable gure, like at the Salpêtrière, but a likeable and admired
one.62 Compare the social circumstances of Freud and Breuer’s hysterics
to Augustine’s. The latter was a live-in maid in a wealthy household,
whose head patriarch sexually abused her at age 13.63 Both of these social
circumstances support a theory of social and cultural context as causes of
hysteria, but it is telling that the view of the hysteric as sympathetic and
admirable is only awarded to the wealthy one.
From Hysteric toSchizophrenic
The fascination with hysteria largely faded in the period after World War
II, with schizophrenia taking its place. Statistically, schizophrenia did not
primarily afict women, as hysteria did, but was equally prevalent in
women and men. This did not affect the fact that the gure of the female
schizophrenic in mid-twentieth-century culture became what the hysteric
was in nineteenth-century culture. Showalter explains that “modernist lit-
erary movements have appropriated the schizophrenic woman as the sym-
bol of linguistic, religious, and sexual breakdown and rebellion.” This is
why, for Showalter, the disease “offers a remarkable example of the cul-
tural conation of femininity and insanity.”64
Some schizophrenic symptoms, particularly “passivity, depersonaliza-
tion, disembodiment, and fragmentation” have been read as a direct
reection of women’s social situation. Some feminist scholars have argued
that schizophrenia is the perfect literary metaphor for the female condi-
tion, expressive of women’s lack of condence, dependency on external,
often masculine, denitions of the self, split between the body as sexual
object and the mind as subject, and vulnerability to conicting social mes-
sages about femininity and maturity.65
Within this framework it is society’s patriarchal structures that are to
blame when a woman becomes schizophrenic. Similar to the early Freudian
analyses of hysteria, it is the limited roles available to women that cause the
disease. In many of the literary works from the early 1960s that deal with
schizophrenia, the act of institutionalizing women on the grounds of their
diagnosis is represented as patriarchy’s way of attempting to control
women who do not conform.66
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47
One of the most known and lauded literary heroines associated with
schizophrenia is Sylvia Plath. Her ctional work The Bell Jar (1963)
inspired many feminist readings of the protagonist as breaking down
under the pressures of patriarchal society. With Plath’s real life following a
very similar trajectory, and ending in suicide at age 30, she was established
as an icon of contemporary female madness. Part of a larger movement of
female literature critical of contemporary psychiatric institutions, she also
became an important gure in the early women’s liberation movement of
the 1960s. For the American feminist movement at the time, Plath “grew
into a saint of female victimization, her madness and suicide themselves
signals of what patriarchy did to talented women who dared to aspire.”67
During the 1950s and 60s, schizophrenia became the most common
diagnosis in America, and shortened in everyday speech to “schizzy” it
became a synonym for crazy, odd, weird, or peculiar.68 Many of the behav-
iors that were diagnosed as pathological at the time would most likely be
understood as deance or teenage unruliness today, and this over-
diagnostication fueled feminist interpretations of schizophrenia as some-
thing used to limit women with aspirations beyond contemporary gender
conventions.69
Feminism andPsychoanalysis
While Freud himself most likely had no moralizing intentions behind his
work, when psychoanalysis was taken up as a profession, especially in the
US, his theories were largely transformed into norms with which women
had to comply. This meant that new neurotic conditions ourished, which
stigmatized “women with psychological diagnoses that had their basis as
much in the needs of medical and social conformity as in sexual difcul-
ties.”70 In post-Second World War America, tropes such as “the frigid
woman” and “the nymphomaniac” became popular labels of psychic
imbalance as “psychoanalysis ourished as a far more normative profession
than Freud had ever imagined.”71
The Freudian “theory of the girl’s anatomical deciency” was one such
essentialist view. This thesis included a view of woman as castrated, “lead-
ing to the female version of the Oedipus complex, which comprised penis
envy, feelings of inferiority or self-hatred, and contempt for the mother.”72
Feminist thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir in her classic The Second
Sex showed that woman had always been dened in relation to man, and
challenged Freud’s idea of gender relations. Betty Friedan and Kate Millett
2 A HISTORICAL LINEAGE OF SAD AND MAD WOMEN

48
in America, Germaine Greer and Juliet Mitchell in Britain, among many
others, pointed out the part Freud’s psychoanalysis had played in women’s
oppression in the West.73 For Millett, one of the main problems of Freud’s
theories was that it individualized the family dynamics and “undercut an
engagement in sexual politics, the very possibility of women acting as the
collectivity they in fact were.”74 Within the conservative iteration of psy-
choanalysis, resistance to stereotypes of motherhood or wifeliness was clas-
sied as neurosis and women who refused to conform were deemed crazy.
Phyllis Chesler published her seminal book Women and Madness in
1972, where she argued that denitions of mental illness were directly
linked to conventional understandings of femininity and masculinity, and
that any norm violation tended to be understood as madness. But as the
1970s progressed, the eld of women’s studies began to be established
and there was a move by many feminist scholars to themselves train as
psychoanalysts and psychologists. This meant that an increasing number
of women populated the psychoanalytic eld, and the profession gradually
became less male-dominated.75
One of the feminist analysts was Juliet Mitchell, whose 1974 book
Psychoanalysis and Feminism began to salvage psychoanalysis and highlight
Freud’s importance for the feminist project. In Europe Jacques Lacan’s
development of psychoanalysis was highly inuential among feminists. In
Lacan’s interpretation, the phallus did not correspond to the literal penis,
but to the symbolic order of civilization where the phallus was most val-
ued. For the feminists following in his footsteps, “psychoanalytic thinking,
which posited a dynamic psychic reality and no gendered essentials, was
women’s best hope of escaping a reduction to essentialist terms.”76
Antipsychiatry andtheRadical Schizophrenic
In conjunction with the feminist critique and redenition of psychoanaly-
sis grew a wider antipsychiatry movement, spearheaded by R.D. Laing in
the UK. Together with Aaron Esterson, Laing conducted a study of
women who had been hospitalized as chronic schizophrenics, which con-
cluded that the cause of their illness was in their family situation and not
in their biological makeup.77 Laing’s theories blossomed around the
height of 1960s counterculture, and his stance on schizophrenia was that
it was not a mental illness but “a mode of insight and prophecy.”78 In this
framework psychosis was gloried as the route to spiritual and religious
wisdom, much like the LSD trips popular at the time.
F. THELANDERSSON

49
In 1965, to test their theories about schizophrenia, Laing and a group
of antipsychiatrists started an experimental clinic at Kingsley Hall in East
London.79 Showalter points out that Laing’s theories generally held that
women were being unfairly institutionalized and that schizophrenia was
partly caused by the role women had been given in a patriarchal society.
When the clinic at Kingsley Hall opened, however, all of the doctors were
men, and “the model patient was a woman.”80 In practice, women never
obtained the status of doctor, which, no matter how much antipsychia-
trists critiqued it, remained a position of great authority. Laing even had a
“star schizophrenic,” just like Charcot had his star hysterics. Mary Barnes,
a 40-year-old catholic nurse, became, as Showalter puts it, Laing’s
Augustine.
Barnes had a long history of mental illness and had been hospitalized in
other institutions for years before coming to Kingsley Hall. What set her
apart from the institutionalized hysterics of the previous century was that
she herself sought out Laing’s treatment. She had read his inuential book
The Divided Self and concluded that his experimental methods were going
to cure her. She also wrote her own narrative about her experiences at
Kingsley Hall, in addition to establishing herself as a painter, with her art-
work being displayed to the public on multiple occasions. Barnes became
the face of the English antipsychiatry movement, even having a play writ-
ten about her time at Laing’s clinic.81
The rise oFpsychopharMaceuTicals
As the cultural fascination with schizophrenia faded, the consumption of
psychopharmaceuticals outside of the institution increased and became
the new venue through which feminine coded madness expressed itself.
This coincided with the gradual process of closing asylums in Europe and
the United States, which was partly inuenced by government cutbacks
and anti-psychiatry movements, but whose primary instigator was the
development of said psychopharmaceutical drugs.82 In the US, this move
began in 1955 with the widespread introduction of the antipsychotic drug
chlorpromazine, commonly known as Thorazine, and was further enacted
10 years later with the introduction of the federal health care programs
Medicare and Medicaid.83
The history of American psychiatry is often told as that of a professional
eld that in its early years was heavily inuenced by psychoanalysis (and
dominated by its restrictive gender roles), but sometime in the 1970s was
2 A HISTORICAL LINEAGE OF SAD AND MAD WOMEN

50
taken over by neuroscience and an “objective” prescription of pills.84 An
important part of this was the development, and transformation of, the
American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM). The rst edition was published in 1952 and was
largely made up of psychoanalytical disorders that “assumed presenting
symptoms, and, indeed, personality itself, to be the result of early life con-
icts that were mapped onto the unconscious psychical apparatus for the
remainder of life.”85 In the 1970s, however, a series of randomized clinical
research studies revealed the benets of biological psychiatry and psycho-
pharmacology. In this new framework, “scientic ndings laid bare neural
pathways that exposed the inner workings of the mind.”86 The result was
the creation of an “‘objectiable, biological’ psychiatry that eschewed the
role of early-life experience to identity formation and instead looked
beneath these constructs to the level of the anatomic substrate.”87 And
most importantly, the primary treatment for the biological mental disor-
ders was psychopharmaceutical rather than psychoanalytical or
psychodynamic.
This change was reected in the third edition of the DSM, published in
1980 and signicantly reworked under the leadership of Robert Spitzer.
Previous to this edition psychiatrists often had different understandings of
the same diagnosis and the aim was to create a reliable system with stable
denitions of mental disorders. 25 committees, made up of scientically
inclined, anti-psychoanalytic, psychiatrists, were created to come up with
detailed denitions of diagnoses. Each diagnosis included in the DSM-III
came with a checklist of symptoms, and specic criteria for how many of
these symptoms needed to be present for a diagnosis to be made.88 With
the new criteria, the American Psychiatric Association had created “a man-
ual with a biomedical ‘viability’.”89 The DSM-III and its subsequent edi-
tions have had an enormous impact on psychiatry worldwide, as it is the
most widely used diagnostic manual globally, employed by psychiatrists
almost everywhere to determine diagnoses.
As Appignanesi critically points out, two important driving forces
behind the remaking of the DSM and the turn towards a biological psy-
chiatry were pharmaceutical and insurance companies. “Big Pharma”
requested standardization of disorders so as to be able to show medica-
tion’s efciency with particular demographics, and insurers wanted mea-
surable symptoms/illnesses so as to regulate their payments.90 When the
DSM was imported to Europe and countries with public health care, the
text was used by governments to decide which treatments to cover.
F. THELANDERSSON

51
The DSM made psychiatry a quantiable science, like other medicine,
and removed the fuzziness of psychoanalysis and other psychotherapies.
This was especially important for insurance companies and governments,
where the set diagnoses of the DSM alongside its quantiable talk therapy
colleague—cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)—gave those in charge of
paying for treatments a range of measurable evidence of efciency.91 A
cynical reading of this kind of treatment is that a prescription and ten ses-
sions of CBT makes the patient ready for the labor market again.
Jonathan Michel Metzl has also critiqued the idea that the shift from
psychotherapy to bio-psychiatry in mainstream treatments of mental ill-
ness left the biased psychoanalytical assumptions about gender and the
family behind, letting the tangible “truth” of biology take its place. Metzl
argues that the psychiatric discourse that claims to have displaced the gen-
der roles of psychoanalysis via its reliance on an “objective” biology, in
fact, maintains and reproduces these very roles. Through a detailed analy-
sis of pop cultural representations of psychotropic drugs, he shows how
medications and their cultural representations have worked in dynamic
ways to inuence the development of psychopharmacology itself. His
study ranges from the release of the rst “miracle cure for anxiety,”
Miltown, in the 1950s, via the tranquilizer craze of the 1960s and 70s
with Valium at its center, to the ubiquitousness of Prozac in the 1990s.92
Throughout the development of psychopharmacology, the connection
between femininity and mental dis-ease remained strong, despite the bio-
psychiatrical promises of “objective” approaches that went beyond gen-
der. The “’emotional’ problems [that] could be cured simply by visiting a
doctor, obtaining a prescription, and taking a pill” were primarily mar-
keted as cures against female ailments, such as “a woman’s frigidity, to a
bride’s uncertainty, to a wife’s indelity.”93 Metzl suggests that the anxiet-
ies 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 essential-
ist 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 upbeat and optimistic so that she could perform
the tasks required by her particular line of work.94
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52
Anorexia andEating Disorders
Metzl’s argument speaks, again, to the relation between the specic
pathologizations of women and contemporary gender relations. Another
set of diagnoses that have been highly feminized is anorexia and accompa-
nying eating disorders. Susan Bordo has written signicantly about their
role in Western culture as diseases that primarily affect women and that
arose as particularly prominent in the 1980s and 1990s.95 Eating disorders
might take their most visible form on the physical body, but they are rmly
rooted in the mind, and thus belong to the “family” of psychopathologies.
Bordo’s analysis is rooted in Foucauldian theories of how power/knowl-
edge structures come to discipline the body and psyche down to the level
of inuencing the process of subjectivation. In that vein she argues that
“the escalation of eating disorders into a signicant social phenomenon
arises at the intersection of patriarchal culture and post-industrial capital-
ism.”96 Eating disorders, then, are strongly connected to the social and
cultural context in which they are found. Bordo further argues that
anorexia is not an individual expression of a pathology, but “a remarkably
overdetermined symptom of some of the multifaceted and heterogeneous
distresses of our age.”97
Psychotherapist Susie Orbach argued in a similar vein, based on her
own experience treating women with eating disorders, that anorexia is “a
hunger strike, a protest against times which hold out the promise of inde-
pendence and a life lived beyond the home while simultaneously demand-
ing that women, as lovers, wives, mothers or carers, service the needs of
others.”98 Orbach’s book, Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a
Metaphor for Our Age, was rst published in 1986 and has since become a
classic printed in multiple editions. In both Bordo’s and Orbach’s argu-
ments, we see again how larger anxieties in society and culture are expressed
in the pathologization of female mental health. They both also make the
case for a feminist interpretation of self-starving as an act of protest, and
thus they echo earlier feminist readings of mental dis-ease as a refusal of
feminine conventions, such as those of ctional portrayals of Victorian
madwomen and the rebellious schizophrenic. But crucially, the connec-
tions between eating disorders and feminist rebellion are not presented as
conscious choices by the suffering individuals. Bordo directly states that
“anorexia is not a philosophical attitude; it is a debilitating afiction,” and
remarks that “these pathologies of female protest … actually function as if
in collusion with the cultural conditions that produced them.”99 This
F. THELANDERSSON

53
opens up for an understanding of mental illness diagnoses as affected and
inuenced by contemporary social mores without seeing the sociocultural
connection as “proving” that the afiction is “made up” or only socially
constructed. In other words, the fact that social structures are reected in
the popularity of a particular diagnosis does not take away from the suffer-
ing experienced by those who have received it.
Feminist Approaches toPsychopharmaceuticals
Feminist interpretations of medical diagnoses and treatments were promi-
nent also in relation to the introduction of Prozac on the mainstream
cultural and medical scene in the early 1990s, when narratives of women
taking the drug were abundant. Judith Kegan Gardiner addresses feminist
approaches to these narratives and to psychopharmacology in general in
her inuential essay “Can Ms. Prozac Talk Back? Feminism, Drugs, and
Social Constructionism” from 1995. In it she reviews three of the most
prominent contemporary books about Prozac, the rst two written by
medical professionals: Peter D.Kramer’s Listening to Prozac: A Psychiatrist
Explores Antidepressant Drugs and the Remaking of the Self (1993); Peter
R.Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin’s What Doctors Won’t Tell You About
Today’s Most Controversial Drug (1994); and writer Elizabeth Wurtzel’s
autobiography Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America (1994).
Writing at a time when feminist scholarship still held on rmly and
unequivocally to the idea that women’s depression was a result of patriar-
chy, Kegan Gardiner addresses the contradictory behavior she had encoun-
tered in personal meetings with other feminist scholars. The theoretical
consensus seemed to be that there were no biological components to
depression, only negative social circumstances. But Kegan Gardiner
describes how she repeatedly met feminist scholars who held this critical
position while simultaneously taking Prozac themselves to alleviate depres-
sive symptoms. This led her to ask “what drugs like Prozac mean for
women today and what the discourses about them say to and about
American feminism.”100
Kegan Gardiner’s reading of the two physicians’ texts shows how they
exemplify contesting opinions of Prozac at the time. For Kramer, the drug
works miracles in freeing women from traditional female roles, and he
even calls it outright feminist and empowering.101 Breggin and Breggin
hold the almost opposite view, which Kegan Gardiner describes as similar
to cultural feminism, extolling “women’s traditional virtues, including
2 A HISTORICAL LINEAGE OF SAD AND MAD WOMEN

54
maternal nurturance and empathy, and view[ing] women as endangered
by the patriarchal violence of doctors and the drug industry.”102
Wurtzel’s autobiographical narrative, which Kegan Gardiner also
reviews, instead recounts a rsthand experience of taking Prozac.103
Wurtzel is a professional woman—a Harvard student and successful jour-
nalist who “portrays herself as the daughter of an abandoning father and
an overinvolved mother.”104 She has a long history of depression and has
had multiple therapists without results. Relief comes when she meets her
rst psychiatrist who prescribes her Prozac. The drug alleviates her symp-
toms and helps her recover from depression. Importantly, Wurtzel does
not portray Prozac as a wonder drug that immediately cures, but sees it as
a necessary tool in addition to therapy.105 Autobiographical and ctional
narratives like Wurtzel’s were plentiful in the 1990s, all following similar
trajectories of nding relief from the drug, then having it wear off and
result in disappointment and regression, to nally end in a more or less
balanced mental state.106
Are the “Ms Prozacs” in these narratives equivalent to the hysteric
Augustine or the schizophrenic Mary Barnes? The fact that Wurtzel’s
book became a best seller and was turned into a feature lm in 2001 sug-
gests that “Ms Prozac”-narratives took hold in American culture. As such
the young woman on anti-depressants can be seen as the embodiment of
female madness in the late twentieth and early twenty-rst century.
Narratives like Wurtzel’s, which assign positive attributes to anti-
depressants, might seem to propagate a view that always deems drugs nec-
essary in the treatment of depression. But paying attention to details, these
stories also portray ambivalence about taking psychopharmaceuticals.
Here again then is the question that keeps resurfacing in the various
analyses of femininely coded mental illness regarding its cause. Is female
madness socially constructed or rooted in a biological and incontestable
“truth”? If it is the former, is madness available as a radical tool to oppose
power structures, as many feminist scholars of literary madness narratives
have argued? And if it is the latter, do we have to give up on any attempt
at viewing mental health as anything other than what the current biopsy-
chiatric episteme holds to be true? What scholars like Bordo, Kegan
Gardiner, Metzl, and Wilson suggest, is that there is an in-between where
the complex entanglements of psyche and soma can be explored.107 And as
Appignanesi points out, “in a rampantly medicalized age, the classication
of depression or borderline carries not stigma but the hope of cure.”108
Whereas in previous eras a diagnosis might have meant connement,
F. THELANDERSSON

55
signicant limitations to one’s life, and rampant stigma, in the early
twenty-rst century, a diagnosis is in many places what will guarantee sup-
port and relief.
The discourses around diagnoses like depression, anxiety, bipolar disor-
der, and more that I examine in the rest of the book are in indirect dia-
logue with the history of female pathologizations of mental health explored
in this chapter. I hope to have shown that there are clear connections
between contemporary sociocultural discourses and popular mental illness
diagnoses in that understanding of what is wrong with suffering women
always takes shape in a larger cultural context that inevitably informs the
articulation of dis-ease.
While women’s sad experiences historically have been classied as
pathologies leading to institutionalization and connement, in the early
twenty-rst century, they tend to be medicalized within a biochemical
discourse that reverts to (deinstitutionalized) psychotropic drugs and psy-
chotherapy as solutions. In this way, the current pathologization of wom-
en’s sad experiences takes place within a neoliberal framework that does
not position them as abject and (completely) other, but instead renders
them intelligible within a larger culture of self-help in which the individual
is responsible for her own wellbeing.109 In this framework, all ties between
health and structures of inequality are severed, and any attempts at politi-
cizing widespread ill health are thwarted. In the chapters to come I argue
that this mode of thinking about mental health is dominant, but not all-
encompassing in contemporary popular culture. Alongside the protable
vulnerability of the most mainstream representations of mental illness,
there are several sites where ties between mental wellbeing and larger
power structures are being made, most explicitly in Teen Vogue and among
the sad girls on Instagram. In these spaces of sad girl culture, more radical
understandings of feeling bad can be found, where both the suffering of
those who struggle is acknowledged and critical analyses of the structural
causes of diagnoses are spoken.
noTes
1. Appignanesi, Sad, mad and bad; Chesler, Women’s madness; Showalter,
The female malady.
2. Chesler, Women’s madness.
3. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the neurological body.
4. Appignanesi, Sad, mad and bad; Showalter, The female malady.
2 A HISTORICAL LINEAGE OF SAD AND MAD WOMEN

56
5. Foucault, Discipline and punish.
6. Ibid; Foucault, History of madness.
7. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic.
8. Showalter, The female malady, 8.
9. Ibid, 8.
10. Ibid, 8.
11. Ibid, 8.
12. Ibid, 8.
13. Appignanesi, Sad, mad and bad, 50.
14. Ibid, 50.
15. Showalter, The female malady, 10.
16. Showalter, The female malady, 8.
17. Showalter, The female malady, 38.
18. Appignanesi, Sad, mad and bad, 115.
19. Ibid, 126.
20. Showalter, The female malady, 10.
21. Ibid, 13.
22. Ibid, 14.
23. Gilbert and Gubar, The madwoman in the attic, 88.
24. Ibid, ix.
25. Caminero-Santangelo, The madwoman can’t speak, 1.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid, 132.
28. Didi-Huberman, Invention of hysteria, 6, emphasis in original.
29. Showalter, The female malady, 2.
30. Didi-Huberman, Invention of hysteria, 4.
31. Free and Brown, “Freeing the insane.”
32. Didi-Huberman, Invention of hysteria.
33. Showalter, The female malady, 148, 167-168.
34. Didi-Huberman, Invention of hysteria, 68.
35. Ibid, 68, emphasis in original.
36. Ibid, 67, 68, emphasis in original.
37. Ibid, 69, emphasis in original.
38. Showalter, The female malady, 147.
39. Didi-Huberman, Invention of hysteria, 115.
40. Ibid, 115.
41. Showalter, The female malady, 148.
42. Didi-Huberman, Invention of hysteria, 32, emphasis in original.
43. Ibid, 32.
44. Ibid, 88-89.
45. Bourneville and Régnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière.
46. Ibid, 157.
F. THELANDERSSON

57
47. Showalter, The female malady, 154.
48. See Chesler, Women’s madness; Showalter, The female malady; Showalter,
Hystories.
49. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the neurological body.
50. Ibid, 5.
51. Showalter, The female malady, 154.
52. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the neurological body, 6.
53. Bourneville and Régnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière,
plate XIV.
54. Appignanesi, Sad, mad and bad, 152.
55. Ibid, 155; Showalter, The female malady, 156.
56. Showalter, The female malady, 156.
57. Ibid, 158.
58. Appignanesi, Sad, mad and bad, 160.
59. Foucault, The history of sexuality.
60. Appignanesi, Sad, mad and bad, 222.
61. Ibid, 223.
62. Showalter, The female malady, 155-158.
63. Didi-Huberman, Invention of hysteria, 157.
64. Showalter, The female malady, 204.
65. Ibid, 213.
66. Ibid, 213.
67. Appignanesi, Sad, mad and bad, 363.
68. Ibid, 285.
69. Ibid, 401.
70. Ibid, 227.
71. Ibid, 227.
72. Showalter, The female malady, 199.
73. Appignanesi, Sad, mad and bad, 418-419.
74. Ibid, 419.
75. Ibid, 422.
76. Ibid, 423.
77. Laing and Esterson, Sanity, madness, and the family.
78. Showalter, The female malady, 229.
79. Ibid, 230.
80. Ibid, 232.
81. Ibid, 232-236.
82. Appignanesi, Sad, mad and bad, 413.
83. Torrey, Out of the shadows, 8.
84. Metzl, Prozac on the couch, 1.
85. Ibid, 1.
86. Ibid, 1.
2 A HISTORICAL LINEAGE OF SAD AND MAD WOMEN

58
87. Ibid, 2.
88. Appignanesi, Sad, mad and bad, 526-527.
89. Ibid, 528.
90. Ibid, 528-529.
91. Ibid, 529.
92. Metzl, Prozac on the couch, 72-73, 163-199.
93. Ibid, 72.
94. Ibid, 15.
95. Bordo, Unbearable Weight.
96. Ibid, 32.
97. Ibid, 141, italicization in original.
98. Appignanesi, Sad, mad and bad, 446; Orbach, Hunger Strike.
99. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 150, 159.
100. Kegan Gardiner, “Can Ms. Prozac Talk Back?,” 502.
101. Kramer, Listening to prozac.
102. Kegan Gardiner, “Can Ms. Prozac Talk Back?,” 508-509; Breggin and
Breggin, Talking back to Prozac.
103. Wurtzel, Prozac nation.
104. Kegan Gardiner, “Can Ms. Prozac Talk Back?,” 509.
105. Ibid, 509.
106. Metzl, “Prozac and the pharmacokinetics of narrative form.”
107. Bordo, Unbearable Weight; Kegan Gardiner, “Can Ms. Prozac Talk
Back?;” Metzl, Prozac on the couch; Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and
the neurological body.
108. Appignanesi, Sad, mad and bad, 506.
109. Franssen, “The celebritization of self-care;” Johnson, “Managing Mr.
Monk;” Rose, Inventing our Selves.
reFerences
Appignanesi, Lisa. Sad, Mad and Bad: Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800.
London: Virago Press, 2008.
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Tenth
anni. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2003.
Bourneville, Désiré Magloire, and Paul-Marie-Léon Régnard. Iconographie
Photographique de La Salpêtrière. Paris: Bureaux du Progrès médical/Delahaye
and Lecrosnier, 1879.
Breggin, Peter R., and Ginger Ross Breggin. Talking Back to Prozac: What Doctors
Won’t Tell You about Today’s Most Controversial Drug. NewYork: St. Martin’s
Press, 1994.
Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity Is
Not Subversive. Ithaca, NewYork: Cornell University Press, 1998.
F. THELANDERSSON

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Chesler, Phyllis. Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness? New York &
London: St. Martin’s Grifn, 2005.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic
Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Cambridge, MA and London, England: The
MIT Press, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. NewYork: Random House LLC, 1977.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. The Will to Knowledge. History of
Sexuality. NewYork & Toronto: Random House, 1978.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception.
NewYork: Vintage, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. Vol. 1. Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2006.
Franssen, Gaston. “The Celebritization of Self-Care: The Celebrity Health
Narrative of Demi Lovato and the Sickscape of Mental Illness.” European
Journal of Cultural Studies 23, no. 1 (2020): 89–111. https://doi.
org/10.1177/1367549419861636.
Free, Elizabeth, and Theodore M. Brown. “Freeing the Insane.” American
Journal of Public Health 96, no. 10 (2006).
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2000.
Johnson, Davi A. “Managing Mr. Monk: Control and the Politics of Madness.”
Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 1 (2008): 28–47. https://
doi.org/10.1080/15295030701851130.
Kegan Gardiner, Judith. “Can Ms. Prozac Talk Back? Feminism, Drugs, and Social
Constructionism.” Feminist Studies 21, no. 3 (1995): 501–17.
Kramer, Peter D. Listening to Prozac: A Psychiatrist Explores Antidepressant Drugs
and the Remaking of the Self. NewYork: Viking Penguin, 1993.
Laing, R.D., and Aaron Esterson. Sanity, Madness, and the Family: Families of
Schizophrenics. Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1970.
Metzl, Jonathan. “Prozac and the Pharmacokinetics of Narrative Form.” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27, no. 2 (2001): 347–80. https://
doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004.
Metzl, Jonathan. Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder
Drugs. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003.
Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing and Women.
NewYork: Pantheon Books, 1974.
Orbach, Susie. Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age.
London and NewYork: Routledge, 2005.
Rose, Nikolas. Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. Cambridge,
NewYork and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture,
1830-1980. NewYork: Pantheon Books, 1985.
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60
Showalter, Elaine. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. NewYork:
Columbia University Press, 1997.
Torrey, E.Fuller. Out of the Shadows: Confronting America’s Mental Illness Crisis.
NewYork: John Wiley & Sons, 1997.
Wilson, Elizabeth A. Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body. Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2004.
Wurtzel, Elizabeth. Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America. NewYork:
Houghton Mifin, 1994.
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and
indicate if changes were made.
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and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the
permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copy-
right holder.
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CHAPTER 3
Mental Health inMagazines: Relatability
andCritique inCosmopolitan andTeen Vogue
As instructive texts for how to live, women’s magazines have been of inter-
est to feminist scholars as reproducers of social norms and structures. The
emergence of digital media has signicantly weakened the hold of maga-
zines on popular women’s discourse, leading to declining revenues as
advertisers and readers move to free online platforms.1 But as publications
with large corporations behind them, they are still worthy of study as rep-
resentatives of traditional advice media that espouse scripts for how to
approach mental health. This chapter thus looks at conversations around
depression and anxiety in the online archives of Cosmopolitan (US) and
Teen Vogue, based primarily on material published from 2008–2018. I
examine the different orientations of these magazines when it comes to
mental health by discussing their respective styles, tone, narratives, mode
of address, and types of pedagogy and support around these issues.
Angela McRobbie’s study of the girls’ magazine Jackie was one of the
rst and most inuential feminist analyses of this media genre.2 McRobbie
argues that publications in this genre “dene and shape the woman’s
world, spanning every stage from early childhood to old age [where] the
exact nature of the woman’s role is spelt out in detail, according to her age
and status.”3 One aspect of this guidance was the supportive function pro-
vided by these magazines, often in the form of advice columns where
experts answered questions about everything from relationships to medi-
cal problems.4
© The Author(s) 2023
F. Thelandersson, 21st Century Media and Female Mental Health,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16756-0_3

62
McRobbie describes how Jackie presents an ideal teenage girl whose
interests and priorities go hand in hand with contemporary patriarchal and
capitalist values. Other scholars have also identied magazines as key sites
of cultural constructions of women, men, and gender relations.5 Much of
this research has contended that magazines convey damaging messages
that propagate gender inequality and present a narrow feminine ideal cen-
tered on beauty, fashion, and romance. They have been read as promoting
negative body ideals and leading to destructive dieting and plastic sur-
gery,6 as well as reproducing power hierarchies along the lines of class,
race, and sexuality.7
As a postfeminist sensibility permeated media culture in the late 1990s
and early 2000s, so magazines became important sites for postfeminist
messaging. In simplied terms, at rst this was expressed in the sense that
feminist goals were seen as having already been achieved, so any larger
social transformation along gender lines was unnecessary.8 More recently
a postfeminist sensibility has transformed into something more subtle,
where feminism is acknowledged as important but reconceptualized in
individual terms that emphasize choice, empowerment, and competition
(see Chap. 1 for a more elaborate discussion of this).9 This message is seen
clearly in the world of magazines, where several outlets have declared their
support of gender equality and incite their readers to become empowered
and independent subjects.
Additionally, there is now a focus on “positive” images alongside the
incitements to self-improvement. In her analysis of sex and relationship
advice in Glamour, Rosalind Gill points out that women’s magazines have
always portrayed femininity as “contingent– requiring constant anxious
attention, work and vigilance.”10 The advice of the current moment, how-
ever, is marked by an intensied self-surveillance that reaches into “entirely
new spheres of life and intimate conduct,” and focuses signicantly on the
psychological. The postfeminist subject is urged to change her attitude
toward herself and become positive, rather than only change her physical
appearance. For Gill, this is another way in which the psychic life of post-
feminism expresses itself by restructuring its subject at the level of her
subjectivity.11
One aspect that repeatedly comes up in the scholarly work on women’s
magazines is their contradictions, how they tend to present messages
about being condent about your body alongside pages and pages of
advertisements for how to diet and shape your body into submission. Gill
notes that rather than seeing these contradictions as “the ‘endpoint’ of
F. THELANDERSSON

63
analysis of magazines,” one might see it as “the contradictions doing ideo-
logical work.”12 As an example Gill gives the “language of empowerment,
equality and taking charge” which infuses the conversations around inti-
mate entrepreneurship in Glamour magazine, but does so to promote tra-
ditional rather than feminist ideals.13 In this way the magazine avoids
presenting a clearly traditional ideological message, and the presence of
both feminist and anti-feminist ideas marks the outlet as distinctly
postfeminist.
To examine the state of magazine discourse around mental health I
chose Cosmopolitan because it is one of the oldest and most established
women’s magazines in the Anglophone world. It was also the most visited
magazine website during the start of this project. Teen Vogue was then
chosen as a second site because of its positioning as one of the strongest
brands in contemporary girls’ magazine culture in the mid-2010s. Even if
it has not published print issues since December 2017, it lives on as a digi-
tal magazine publisher and has branched out to “consumer experiences”
like a biannual summit and a brand clothing line at Urban Outtters.14
The digital-only focus, the clothing line, and the summit makes Teen
Vogue representative of how magazines respond to a “new media” land-
scape where readers are consuming their content on digital rather than
print platforms.
In terms of methodology, I used the search functions on the publica-
tions’ websites as well as their own tagging system. Overall, Teen Vogue
had published more than twice the amount of articles on the topic of
mental health and illness than Cosmopolitan.15 The signicantly higher
number of pieces in Teen Vogue might suggest that mental health aware-
ness is at the forefront of their brand, something I will discuss more below.
Cosmopolitan and Teen Vogue’s online editions contained few traditional
advice columns of the kind where experts answer readers’ questions related
to mental health. In fact, there was only one in each outlet throughout the
primary decade studied here.16 Even if there were barely any traditional
advice columns, I consider the entire discourses of the magazines as dis-
courses of advice, in the vein of “lifestyle media” which provide scripts for
how to live.17
Next, I will discuss each publication and their dominant themes—their
tone, mode of address, critical stance (and lack of one), and their approach
to support—before doing a direct comparison of how both magazines
covered the same celebrity events and science report.
3 MENTAL HEALTH IN MAGAZINES: RELATABILITY AND CRITIQUE…

64
Cosmopolitan
When Helen Gurly Brown rebranded Cosmopolitan to focus on sex and
pleasure in 1965, the message stood in stark contrast to the women’s
magazines of the day that tended to focus on family and home economics.
Brown successfully cemented the publication’s “sex-centric brand of
female empowerment”18 and established its “fun, fearless female” ethos
during her 32-year tenure.19 According to David Machin and Joanna
Thornborrow, who conducted a discourse analysis of 44 different national
versions of Cosmopolitan from around the globe, the main discourse of the
publication fosters the values of “independence, power and fun.”20 Machin
and Thornborrow look at Cosmopolitan’s coverage of sex and work, two
topics that frequently take center stage in the magazine. They identify the
contradictory ethos characteristic of women’s magazines in this coverage,
showing how Cosmo presents serious information about both sex and
work, but then undercuts it by using a “tongue-in-cheek” tone which
distances the article from both real sex and real work. The same light-
hearted tone that marks the decades-old Cosmopolitan pieces about sex
and careers can be found in the articles about mental health.
In this section I will discuss a few examples from the Cosmo archive that
illustrates the dominant approach of the magazine to issues of men-
tal health.
A Lighthearted andDistanced Tone
The lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek tone of Cosmopolitan’s mental
health coverage is on clear display in the outlet’s many listicles. A listicle is
an article where the majority of the content appears in the form of a list.
The listicle became a popular type of internet “journalism,” as it became
an effective way to draw readers in by promising to condense almost any
subject into easily digestible list form.21 In this sense, the genre almost by
default takes away the seriousness of a topic. The headline is an important
part of this form, and looking at the titles of Cosmo’s listicles reveals what
kind of issues the magazine promises its readers to quickly deal with as well
as who the assumed reader is. The earlier articles tend to adopt a mode of
address that assumes you are interacting with someone else who is
depressed or anxious, like “10 Things You Should Never Say To Someone
With Depression” and its follow up “10 Things You Should Never Say to
Someone With Anxiety.”22 Included in this category are also “13 Things
F. THELANDERSSON

65
Not to Say to Someone Who Is Stressed Out,” “17 Things to Never Say
to a Girl With Borderline Personality Disorder,” and “10 Things You
Should Absolutely Not Say to a Woman With an Eating Disorder.”23 And
even though the titles of these articles imply that the reader is the friend of
someone who is suffering rather than the one suffering themselves, the
content of the pieces is as much for someone with their own experience of
mental illness as someone encountering it second hand, in that they trafc
in a language of recognition. What these pieces have in common is the
negative rhetorical approach of each list item, which states what NOT to
say, before explaining why. For example, the rst item on the list in “10
Things You Should Never Say To Someone With Depression” is simply
“Everyone's depressed.” The author, Anna Breslaw, explains “No, every-
one gets depressed sometimes. It's normal to feel the repercussion of a bad
day …. But diagnosed depression is like any other physical illness that
requires medication. Like, you wouldn't say "Everyone has a thyroid
problem.”24
The later Cosmo listicles instead tend to appeal outright for identica-
tion in the headline, revealing a mode of address that assumes that the
reader herself is suffering from these issues rather than asking for a friend.
Examples include “16 Things Only Girls On Antidepressants Will
Understand,” “14 Struggles Only Girls With Anxiety Will Understand”
and “12 Struggles Only Girls With Depression Will Understand.”25
Related to these are also “17 Dating Struggles Girls With Anxiety
Understand” and “12 Dating Struggles Only Girls With ADHD Will
Understand.”26 The rst three, about antidepressants, anxiety, and depres-
sion, are all written by the same author and published a few days apart in
May of 2016. As the headlines imply, these pieces invite the reader to join
in recognition and agreement. These pieces were published during 2016
and 2017, later than most of the ones about what not to say to someone
with a particular diagnosis, which might be a sign that the perception of
the average Cosmopolitan reader has changed over time. Earlier in the
decade, the editors at Cosmopolitan might have assumed that their readers
did not themselves identify as having a particular diagnosis, but might be
interested in reading about it if it was framed in terms of what to do if you
encounter someone with a mental health issue. But later on, during 2016
and 2017, the average reader is assumed to herself be identifying as
depressed, anxious, and on antidepressants.
In addition, the Cosmopolitan listicles tend to make full use of the lay-
out to further set a lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek tone. Often each
3 MENTAL HEALTH IN MAGAZINES: RELATABILITY AND CRITIQUE…

66
item on the list is accompanied by a GIF or an image to illustrate the point
(this kind of illustration is present in 50% of the Cosmo listicles and only in
one of the Teen Vogue ones). In “16 Things Only Girls On Antidepressants
Will Understand,” for example, a GIF of media personality Kimora Lee
Simmons disapprovingly shaking her head accompanies item number four,
“People asking you why you're on antidepressants is rude as hell,” and a
GIF of actress Molly Ringwald giving the middle nger in the lm The
Breakfast Club is displayed next to item number nine, “People who ask
you if you’ve tried a “natural” solution, as if they’re being really helpful.”27
The use of humorous visuals here serves to distance the reader from the
seriousness of the topic discussed and presents a highly relatable self with
which the reader can identify without feeling too much despair. This is
similar to what Machin and Thornborrow describe in relation to the out-
let’s coverage of sex and work, where the tongue-in-cheek tone serves to
create distance to real sex and real work.28
Common butExceptional
One recurring angle presented in Cosmopolitan is that mental illness is
both exceptional and common, as seen in the above quote about not tell-
ing someone who is depressed that “everyone's depressed.” On the one
hand, there is a strong focus on how having a certain diagnosis is NOT the
same as being “a little sad” (which is articulated in several different ways,
but with the purpose of differentiating the legitimate illness/diagnosis
from a less serious and colloquial experience) and how it in this sense is
exceptional (you are different than your friends who are just bummed out
about a bad exam). Another example of this is “13 Things I Wish I Knew
About Depression When I Was a Teenager” where number two on the list
reads “Your friends might use the same words to describe how they feel,
but they also might have no idea what you're going through.”29 In the
accompanying bullet point the author laments clueless teenage friends
who say they are depressed because of a bad grade, something that is not
the same as suffering from clinical depression. Similarly, in “12 Struggles
Only Girls With Depression Will Understand,” item number three is sim-
ply “How loosely people use the word ‘depressed.’” The author explains
that there is a denitive difference between depression and sadness, stating
that “Depression is chronic, while sadness is eeting. Often times, depres-
sion isn't triggered by anything, while sadness usually is. So no, you're not
sooo ‘depressed’ this season of Game of Thrones is over.”30 Here the
F. THELANDERSSON

67
hyperbolic tone (“you're not sooo ‘depressed’”) and the reference to pop-
ular culture also does the work of distancing the reader from the potential
despair of depression by the use of humor.
On the other hand in this equation, depression is a common experience
because it is just “like any other physical illness that requires medication”31
and also you are not alone in having it, because the writer of the article
shares your experience and so do all of the readers who clicked on it in
recognition. This is also expressed in “13 Things I Wish I Knew About
Depression When I Was a Teenager,” where numbers three and four on
the list are “That needing mental health help is the same as needing physi-
cal health help” and “There is no way you're the only kid at your school
struggling with depression.”32
In this framing, psychology and psychiatry are generally forces of good
that are helping people while acknowledging a host of diseases that have
just not previously been properly treated. Item number three on the list of
what NOT to say to someone with depression exemplies this. The state-
ment that you are not supposed to say is “You don’t need to be on medi-
cation—it’s so overprescribed. Everyone’s on drugs these days,” which
the author explains with:
Yeah, because the medical health world is realizing that mental illnesses are
just as serious as physical ones. It’s easy to pass judgment on these kinds of
medications because of a few college friends who managed to score recre-
ational Adderall, but for every one of those, there are hundreds of people
who have been pulled out of deep emotional and mental holes with the help
of medication prescribed by good psychiatrists. You probably know some of
them—you just don’t know you do.33
Here the author rst equates mental illness with physical illness, and in
so doing reinforces a biomedical paradigm in which what is physiological
is more important than “imsy” psychological stuff. She then ascribes
large potential and hope to medication and psychiatry by naming “hun-
dreds of people who have been pulled out of deep emotional and mental
holes.” Within this framework, psychopharmaceuticals appear as a tech-
nology of hope which does the work of rescuing the subject from the
despair of diagnosis.34 The notion that “the medical health world is real-
izing that mental illnesses are just as serious as physical ones” also rein-
forces a positivist notion that mental illness diagnoses are out there in the
world to be discovered, rather than discursive-material constructions
bound up in particular socio-historical contexts.
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68
The Relatable Self
Another theme that runs throughout the Cosmo pieces is the relatable self.
In her study of a set of meme-based Tumblr blogs which portray everyday
“girl” experiences, Akane Kanai identies the production of “affectively
relatable” online selves that touch upon difcult subjects but do so with
self-deprecating humor that serves to defuse the seriousness of the prob-
lems.35 The result is the production of a “relatable self” that never expresses
too much vulnerability nor condence. I contend that much of
Cosmopolitan’s mental illness articles follow in this vein, and that their
tongue-in-cheek tone serves the same purpose as the humor in Kanai’s
analysis—to produce a “relatable” self that is not too sad or too anxious.
By packaging potentially heavy topics such as depression and anxiety in
easy-to-digest listicles, illustrated by funny GIFs and packed with Internet
slang such as OMG and STFU, one is disarming the topics of their seri-
ousness and weight. This serves a double function—on the one hand, it
lets Cosmopolitan cover serious topics without losing its “fun fearless
female” voice, and in this sense, their writing on mental illness ts into the
overall style and “feel” of its other pieces about things like sex and work.
Like this, depression and anxiety also become tangible on the same level as
these other topics (sex, beauty, work), where recognizing your own feel-
ings in a funny listicle might make those feelings appear less overwhelming
and more manageable. On the other hand, the comedic style in these
pieces risks downplaying the seriousness of living with depression and
anxiety.
Gill and Kanai identify the relatable self as one out of three “new
modalities of feeling in neoliberalism,” alongside “the imperative to con-
dence” and “the promotion of ‘boldness’ as a value in itself.”36 They
describe an interesting interplay between negotiating incitements to con-
dence and the discussion of problems faced in the everyday of late capi-
talism in the blogs Kanai analyzes. They write:
In directing lighthearted humor against the self, the blogs attempt to walk
the line between traditional affective regulations that mandate girls and
women apologize for their presence, please others, and take up less emo-
tional space; and contemporary demands to singlehandedly demonstrate
condent, positive selfhood in relation to the degrading conditions of con-
temporary capitalism.37
F. THELANDERSSON

69
The role of humor here is to defuse the notion that one is overly
impacted by “the degrading conditions of contemporary capitalism.” A
similar negotiation is happening in the Cosmopolitan listicles about mental
illness, where the pains of living with an issue becomes intelligible as a
common, and thus manageable, feature of contemporary life. One specic
way this is being done is in the use of the word “basically” in the listicle
“16 Things Only Girls On Antidepressants Will Understand.” Number 2
on the list reads:
Your body is basically a science experiment until you nd the right meds. It’s
so rare to initially be prescribed the medication that’s right for you, so you
have to try lots of different meds out. But when you nd that perfect com-
bination of meds, you realize it was probably worth it.38
The phrase “your body is basically a science experiment” manages to
describe an unpleasant situation in a slightly detached way, primarily by
adding “basically” to the sentence, which disarms it of its seriousness. By
emphasizing how common it is to have to try out several different medica-
tions before nding the right one, the listicle manages to normalize the
potentially terrifying experience of being a “science experiment” and
assure the reader who might be in the middle of that process to keep at it
because it will be worth it in the end.
Comparing this to Kanai’s blogs, where an expression and acknowledg-
ment of problems is done in a humorous way so as to appear relatable and
not “too much” to other bloggers and to third parties who might encoun-
ter them, the Cosmopolitan listicle here performs this relatability primarily
to readers who are themselves going through the experience and might
need reassurance that it is not as bad as it seems. By folding a distressing
experience (trying out different drugs) into a medical framework in which
it is just business as usual, Cosmopolitan here assures the reader that this
potentially scary phase of managing a depression is common and reason-
able. This approach might minimize the unpleasantness and difculty of
the process by providing some reassurance to readers for whom trivializing
what they are going through can be a way of making it more manageable.
By managing one’s mental health issues like this, one might gain tempo-
rary personal relief, but any discussion of broader systems and possibilities
is left untouched.
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70
Firsthand Narratives ofSuffering, Diagnosis, andRedemption
There are some Cosmo pieces that take a more serious tone, primarily those
that present rsthand accounts of a certain illness that often include a nar-
rative arc of suffering, diagnosis, and redemption. These are similar to
what Lisa Blackman calls the victim-to-victor narrative found in anti-
stigma campaigns, where the protagonist starts out by suffering, then
receives a diagnosis, and is nally salvaged by the help of medication and
therapy.39 These kinds of narratives tend to construct psychiatry as a tech-
nology of hope, whereby the subject enters into successful recovery after
having agreed to the diagnosis and treatment provided by professional
experts. The personal stories in Cosmopolitan largely follow this script,
although it is not always psychiatry that appears as the savior. In a piece
titled “Why I Turn to YouTube When My Anxiety Gets Out of Control,”
author Kerry Justich shares her ways of coping with generalized anxiety
disorder. Describing a recent panic attack caused by a cancellation of sub-
way trains, after unsuccessfully having tried to reach her mother on the
phone, Justich went home and opened up YouTube, where her “favorite
family of vloggers” soothed her anxiety. Like in most personal stories pub-
lished by Cosmo, Justich gives the reader the back story of her diagnosis—
her parents divorced when she was 14, and since then she has tried to keep
strict routines in her life, if these are not followed or something goes awry,
she experiences severe anxiety. Justich describes the severity of it as fol-
lows: “My anxiety paralyzes me. It overwhelms my brain and body, forc-
ing me to shut down. Everything I do, I second-guess. Everything I say, I
quickly question. And everyone I know I fear might someday disappear
from my life.”40 She then recounts how this anxiety came to a head during
her senior year of high school, which is when she saw a therapist and psy-
chologist and was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.
Interestingly, this professional did not suggest medication, only “medita-
tion, counting, working out, writing, and using an ocean waves sound
app,” which goes against critical narratives that assume medication is
always the rst route suggested by psychological professionals. For Justich,
however, none of the suggested methods were successfully able to quiet
her mind. She explains that:
In those moments, I crave human interaction, but when I am in an unsteady
state of mind, I feel like I can’t rely on my friends or family to fulll those
needs. YouTube is the one thing that could turn of f my over- pr ocessing mind.41
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In her analysis of the cultural production of female psychopathology in
women’s magazines, Lisa Blackman draws on Arlie Russell Hochschild’s
study of women’s advice books published from the 1970s up through the
early 1990s.42 Hochschild compares earlier books which adopt a patriar-
chal view of the family, in which the woman is assumed to be unequal to
her husband, with later books that adopt a (somewhat) feminist concep-
tion of family and intimate relationships, where husband and wife are seen
to be equals. For Hochschild, the earlier, patriarchal pieces reect more
“warmth” than the more modern publications, which “call for more open
and more equal communication, but … propose ‘cooler’ emotional strate-
gies with which to engage those equal bonds.”43 This reects a “cultural
cooling” in which the gains of second-wave feminism have mixed with the
goals of capitalism, resulting in “a commercial spirit of intimate life,”
where “part of the content of the spirit of capitalism is being displaced onto
intimate life.”44 Part of this commercialization of intimate life is the ideal-
ization of a self that is “well defended against getting hurt,”45 Hochschild
explains:
The heroic acts a self can perform, in this view, are to detach, to leave and to
depend and need less. The emotion work that matters is control of the feel-
ings of fear, vulnerability and the desire to be comforted. The ideal self
doesn’t need much, and what it does need it can get for itself.46
Blackman picks up on Hochschild’s “no-needs modern woman” and
identies her in the women’s magazines of the early 21st century, where
she appears as someone who “is the primary force in her own life and who
is able to work on herself, through particular techniques of self- production,
such that she can get by with relatively little support from others– particu-
larly men.”47 Here, traditionally masculine “feeling rules” have been dis-
placed on feminine intimate relationships, and women are urged to be
more cool and detached in close relations.
The emotion the no-needs woman fears the most is “the desire to be
taken care of, to be safe and warm, which is embodied in a fear of being
dependent on another, even one’s therapist.”48 For Blackman and
Hochschild, the emotional needs that this feminine subject inevitably has,
despite not wanting to have them, then become relegated to discourses of
self-help (such as advice books or magazines) and professionalized dis-
courses of therapy and counseling. Most importantly, they are shifted away
from the intimate relationship or close family and friends to professional-
ized discourses. Turning back to the Cosmopolitan article from 2015,
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when Justich describes the worst moments of her anxiety, she says that she
craves human interaction, but “when I am in an unsteady state of mind, I
feel like I can’t rely on my friends or family to fulll those needs” and
instead she turns to YouTube which is “the one thing that could turn off
my over-processing mind.” So here Justich goes against the “no needs
modern woman” in the sense that she acknowledges that she longs for
human interaction, but she then immediately disavows that real human
interaction will be able to give her what she actually needs. In so doing she
seems to construct human interaction as too messy and complicated (and
perhaps requiring too much of reciprocated action), whereas watching
human interaction on YouTube via her favorite vlogger family (Justich
links to the SACCONEJOLYs, an Irish family with four small children
who posts new videos about their life every day) provides her with the
simpler, detached, and mediated experience of human interaction.49
In the last paragraph of the article Justich elaborates on her current
relation to therapy and psychological professionals, saying that she has
been able to depend on her therapist less now that she has YouTube. She
says that she could use the therapist’s help sometimes, but:
I feel empowered to know I’ve made it so long on my own. Anxiety is some-
thing that I’ll never live without, but knowing that relief is a literal click
away provides me a little bit of peace in my otherwise chaotic mind.50
Here Justich exemplies a hyper independence from not only family
and friends, but also the professionals that should supposedly be there to
help her. So instead of displacing the care from family and friends to a
professional discourse, like Blackman and Hochschild describe in their
analyses, here we have someone who has gone a step further and has man-
aged to make it also without those professionals. And although this might
be seen as resistance to the dominance of the psy-sciences and psychology
professionals in managing mental health, it can also be read as a response
to a nonfunctioning support system, say the failure of the mental health
care system in the United States. And instead of requiring reforms to a
broken system, or turning to one’s family, Cosmopolitan is here encourag-
ing you to self-medicate with digital media.
Additionally, by saying that she feels “empowered” for having survived
without anyone else for so long she also invokes the language of popular
feminism,51 suggesting that she has gained something on a political level,
although what she seems to have overcome here is only the dependence
on others.
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Denitions andDiagnoses
One last thing to note about Cosmo’s coverage is the presence of specic
denitions of what it means to be depressed, anxious, or in other mental
distress. I ask about these with Blackman’s discussion of the production of
female psychopathology in women’s magazines in mind. Here she urges
scholars to examine “how the arena of relationships is made intelligible
and what concepts allow the distinctions between the normal and the
pathological to be thought.”52 One way to ask that question in relation to
my empirical material is to ask if and how denitions of particular ailments
are given. Is it assumed that the reader already knows what it entails to
suffer from depression? What denitional work is happening and what
stakes and boundaries are being laid out?
The early Cosmo articles tend to describe depression and anxiety more
in general terms of “feeling bad” rather than mention specic diagnoses
by name (even if they have been tagged with them), and the solutions
presented tend to be focused on self-help techniques instead of psychiatric
medications and therapy. The rst and only article from 2009, for exam-
ple, is titled “How to Beat the Winter Blues” and does mention the exis-
tence of the diagnosis Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) but suggests
getting active physically and socially, watching your carbs, going on a
mini-vacation, having sex, and “consider light therapy” as solutions with-
out bringing up therapists or drugs.53 This goes on until 2013, when
depression as clinical illness starts popping up in the Cosmo pieces.54 From
2014 and onward the majority of the articles in Cosmo feature discussion
of specic diagnoses and mental health and illness appear as obvious
aspects of contemporary life. For example, an article from 2015 titled
“This Mom’s Powerful Sele Proves There’s No Shame in Taking Anxiety
Medication” features a viral Facebook post of a woman holding up pre-
scriptions for antidepressant and anxiety medications in a sele and stating
in the caption that she was unashamed to be taking them.55 The post led
to multiple other women responding with their own stories of taking psy-
chiatric medications under the hashtag #MedicatedAndMighty, some-
thing the Cosmo writer comments as follows: “I am a very anxious lady and
I am loving this. Cheers to Jones, all these other women, and to remind-
ing the world that needing medication isn’t anything other than taking a
step toward being healthy.”
Next I will discuss the dominant themes in Teen Vogue and their gener-
ally serious approach to issues of mental health before providing a direct
comparison of how the two outlets covered the same events.
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teen Vogue
Teen Vogue emerged in 2003 as an offshoot of the fashion magazine Vogue
at the same time as other large magazines aimed at adults published their
own teen versions, like Elle Girl (2001-2006), CosmoGirl! (1999-2008),
and Teen People (1998-2006). During the rst 13 years of its existence it
published pieces typical for publications aimed at teenage girls, but it was
signicantly rebranded in 2016 when 29-year old, African-American,
Elaine Welteroth took over as editor in chief.56 Under Welteroth’s leader-
ship the magazine began publishing “more overtly political, and often
feminist, articles” alongside traditional teen magazine fare like fashion and
relationships.57 One piece in particular put Teen Vogue on the map as seri-
ous in its political critique. In December 2016, shortly after the general
election that made Donald Trump president, Lauren Duca published an
article titled “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” which suggested
that the president-elect was engaging in psychological manipulation of the
American people.58 The article spread quickly online and in the main-
stream press, leading to much commentary about the surprising critical
sharpness of the teen magazine. Teen Vogue has continued in this spirit
since, publishing stories about political issues ranging from reproductive
rights to Black Lives Matter.59 At the time of writing, the footer on their
website reads: “The young person’s guide to conquering (and saving) the
world. Teen Vogue covers the latest in celebrity news, politics, fashion,
beauty, wellness, lifestyle, and entertainment.”60 In this way, attention to
politics and critical thinking is folded into the Teen Vogue brand alongside
more “shallow” topics like celebrities, fashion, and makeup. The publica-
tion was even hailed as a “rallying point of resistance” in Trump-era
America, presumably succeeding in their mission.61
Feminist media scholars Natalie Coulter and Kristine Moruzi have ana-
lyzed Teen Vogue’s position as a political outlet for girls by positioning it in
relation to the Victorian girls’ magazine Girl’s Realm (1898–1914), which
was known for its engagement with contemporary issues related to wom-
en’s rights, such as women’s suffrage. By making this historical compari-
son Coulter and Moruzi show that Teen Vogue does not exist in a presentist
vacuum, but is part of a longer history of conceptualizing “the female
reader as engaged with the social and cultural politics of their respective
eras.”62 They argue that the ideal girl dened by Teen Vogue is someone
who “has a political conscious that is explicitly labelled as ‘woke.’”63
“Woke” or “wokeness” has its recent legacy in the Black Lives Matter
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75
movement which popularized the term.64 It often indicates a “critical con-
sciousness of intersecting systems of oppression” that acknowledges the
“oppression that exists in individual and collective experiences.”65 Coulter
and Moruzi point out that the term changes in different circumstances
and that Teen Vogue does not explicitly dene what it means by “woke-
ness,” but that Welteroth’s use of the concept “implies that the magazine
is articulating an awareness of social issues and the ways that systematic
oppressions intersect.”66 They go on to state that part of the magazine’s
“wokeness” is that it ”resists much of the familiar postfeminist narratives
of empowerment and the aspirational fantasies of personal improvement …
that have been endemic in girls’ print culture in the early twenty-rst
century.”67
This ethos of “wokeness” is reected also in the publication’s coverage
of mental illness when connections between mental health and systemic
oppression are made (seen for example in a piece that connects depression
and suicide rates among transgender kids with stigma and hostility against
them or in an article about how racial discrimination causes stress in those
who experience it).68 This happens in 6% of all Teen Vogue’s articles, which
is not an overwhelming amount of times, but far more often than
Cosmopolitan which only connects mental distress with structural inequali-
ties in 1.5% of their pieces.
What stands out with Teen Vogue’s mental health coverage is that it
signicantly increases in 2016, from having been in the single digits up
until 2014, it increases to 23 pieces during 2015 but then signicantly
jumps to 137 articles during 2016. This increase in coverage might be a
sign that articles relating to mental health t well into the publication’s
updated and “woke” brand.
Providing Critical Context
The overall tone in Teen Vogue tended to be straightforward, earnest, and
serious. One way this was expressed was in the kind of topics covered in
their general interest category, which featured both more expected sub-
jects like a story about how telepsychiatry lets therapists treat you via digi-
tal tools like Skype and FaceTime and more politically inected stories like
a hospital getting sued for discrimination after a transgender teen died by
suicide after having been treated there.69
Taking a closer look at one of the stories in this category reveals the
serious tone and critical stance adopted by the publication. In January
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2017 Teen Vogue wrote about the fate of a black teenager, Bresha Meadows,
who was accused of killing her father after she and her family endured
years of abuse by him. The outlet reports that Meadows was transferred
from the juvenile jail she had been staying in for 175 days to a mental
health treatment facility to receive an evaluation. The author of the piece
points out that “despite the change, Bresha will not be free to come and
go from the treatment facility.”70 The support group that had formed
around the hashtag #FreeBresha is then mentioned, as is the day of action
taken to urge the judge to release Meadows from juvenile detention. Here
Teen Vogue cites research that shows the inefciency of such connement
not only by referring to the activist group, but also citing and linking to a
report from the Justice Policy Institute that shows how “incarcerating
young people does little to help them in the long run, instead increasing
their chances of returning to jail or prison in the future.”71 The Teen Vogue
writer, Brittany McNamara, then points out that the #FreeBresha group
called attention to another important issue: “survivors of domestic abuse
being punished.” She cites research from the “Women in Prison Project of
the Correctional Association of New York” which shows that “67% of
women accused of killing someone close to them had been abused by that
person” and that “of all the state’s inmates in for any charge, 75% had
experienced severe physical domestic violence.”72 This leads McNamara to
state that “all too often, survivors of domestic violence are punished for
their survival,” before citing the ofcial statement from the #FreeBresha
group about why the teenager should be freed while awaiting trial. In
many ways this is traditional reporting of a story like this—giving the
reader the backstory of what had previously happened to Meadows in
addition to describing the latest developments in the case. But McNamara
adds a critical perspective to the story by referring to research both about
the inefciency of the juvenile jail system and the high levels of domestic
violence victims among incarcerated women, making it not only a story
about a singular teenage girl’s tragic fate, but also about the larger prob-
lem of women who stand up to their abusers being punished by the legal
system. In this way the outlet lives up to its ethos of wokeness. Additionally,
by tagging this and similar stories with “mental health” and other relevant
tags, it shows up among other, more personal and individual-focused
pieces, and the reader learns to include also such structural issues in the
scope of mental health.
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Seriousness inFavor ofDistanced Relatability
While Cosmo tends to have a tongue-in-cheek tone that presents issues in
relatable ways without getting too threatening or uncomfortable, the tone
in the Teen Vogue pieces is instead marked by a seriousness that treats men-
tal illness in a straightforward and earnest way. This is seen in how differ-
ent the listicles look in each outlet. Teen Vogue had fewer articles in this
genre on the whole than Cosmo (8% versus 15%) and their listicles tended
to maintain the somber tone of the outlet at large. This is seen in a few key
differences in the layout of the listicles in the two outlets. The rst of these
is the introductory paragraph that Teen Vogue includes in all of their listi-
cles, which presents the issue at hand and gives some context. An example
of this kind of introduction is the following, which accompanies the piece
“26 Date Ideas for Your Anxious Partner”:
Anxiety can often make dating a challenge—unfamiliar people and environ-
ments might heighten the mental and physical symptoms someone with
anxiety faces. This can make it difcult to plan a rst date, or even an outing
with a long-term signicant other.73
This gives the reader a framework for why folks with anxiety might
need specic dating ideas, and what those ideas might look like. 100% of
the Teen Vogue listicles include an introduction in this vein, compared to
only 34% of the Cosmo listicles, which often jump straight into the list of
relatable points. Another marked difference between the layout of listicles
in the two outlets is the use of GIFs or humorous illustrations to accom-
pany items on the list. Only 1 of Teen Vogue’s listicles contained GIFs and
comedic images, whereas 50% of Cosmo’s listicles did the same. This con-
tributes to an overall more serious tone in Teen Vogue and underscores the
more relatable and easygoing approach taken by Cosmo. The presence of
illustrations like these in Cosmo contributes to the more lighthearted tone
of that publication and the lack of them in Teen Vogue in comparison con-
tributes to its more earnest tone.
The above article is also an example of Teen Vogue collaborating with
the website The Mighty, which is a media platform and digital community
focused on connecting people facing health challenges and disabilities.74
The 26 date ideas presented in the listicle at hand are pooled from The
Mighty community members who themselves suffer from anxiety and have
contributed what an ideal date looks like for them. Teen Vogue has a few
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similar pieces that are collaborations with the online therapy service
Talkspace, while Cosmo does not have any similar collaborations.
This seriousness is also reected in the topics of the listicles themselves.
Within this category on the site one can, for example, nd one titled “11
Things You Can Do To Help Black Lives Matter End Police Violence,”
which manages to both explain the importance of mental health in the
Black Lives Matter movement (number eight on the list is “Advocate for
mental health intervention” and explains how victims of police brutality
often have mental health issues) and situate political causes like these in
the context of mental health by tagging the article mental health and thus
showing it to readers who are browsing those topics.75 This is again a way
in which the magazine lives up to its “wokeness.”
Another example is the piece “11 Things You Can Do to Avoid Self-
Harm” which is written by Vijayta Szpitalak, who is introduced as a
“Columbia University trained licensed mental health counselor with a
practice in New York since 2010.”76 This is an example of Teen Vogue
employing experts in their mental health coverage, something they do in
14% of their articles (compared to 9% of Cosmo’s pieces). Taking a closer
look at how this piece is structured reveals how Teen Vogue tends to address
its readers.
The article starts with a trigger warning stating that it “contains detailed
information about self-harm in the form of cutting and may be disturbing
for some readers.” The text then begins by addressing the reader directly,
stating “chances are you or someone you know cuts themselves” before
mentioning two celebrities who have been open about their cutting
(Angelina Jolie and Demi Lovato). Szpitalak then introduces self-harm
and cutting by stating rst how common it is (citing research that shows
46% of high school students in the US having engaged with it at some
point) and then explaining what self-harm actually is. This bare-bones
denition reads: “a maladaptive method of coping that involves non-
suicidal self-iniction of pain in the form of cutting, using anything from
ngernails to razor blades, burning themselves, or preventing previous
wounds from healing.”77 This is an example of Teen Vogue not only men-
tioning clinical diagnoses but also providing denitions from experts or
professional sources of how certain mental illness issues are medically
dened, which I discuss more below.
Szpitalak then describes how there are a number of reasons why people
might engage in self-harming behavior before including a quote from a
(child and adolescent) psychiatrist about possible reasons for cutting. And
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79
then she addresses the reader directly again: “It’s important to rst realize
that cutting doesn’t actually solve any problems, and isn’t an effective
method of coping for the long-term,” before referencing research that has
found a connection between self-harm and suicide attempts. It is not until
after ve opening paragraphs that the listicle itself is introduced with the
following statement: “If you cut, it is possible to stop. The key is replacing
the behavior with a healthy coping mechanism. It takes effort, love, and
patience, but it can be done. As a starter, you can do the following.” The
list then reads as follows: “Identify triggers; Identify emotions; Tell some-
one; Seek professional help; Try a less severe form; Write your future self
letters; Delay cutting; Consider Dialectical Behavior Therapy; Cultivate
mindfulness; Feel a release; Stay positive.”78 There is a seriousness and
weight given to the issue of self-harm here, which is treated like an (almost)
life and death matter. With this piece Teen Vogue shows that it takes the
issue of self-harm and its high prevalence among high school students very
seriously, and in so doing it also encourages its readers to take their own
and their peers’ mental health seriously.
Compare this to Cosmo, who only mentions self-harm in three of their
articles and when the issue appears it is only indirectly: It is mentioned
briey in relation to Demi Lovato; in a study about the antidepressant
drug Paxil; and in one personal story/rsthand account where a writer
describes writing publicly about her mental illness on social media as a
form of self-harm.79 In other words, Cosmo does not give the same weight
to the issue of self-harm as Teen Vogue does. Perhaps this is because self-
harm is an issue often associated with a demographic that is younger than
Cosmopolitan’s target audience, or because it is hard to write about an
issue like this while maintaining a distanced and lighthearted tone.
Nevertheless, the coverage of self-harm in Teen Vogue and its absence in
Cosmo is another example of the different orientations of each magazine.
Denitions andDiagnoses
When it comes to the presence of denitions of depression, anxiety, and
other mental states, the changes over time in Teen Vogue are similar to
Cosmopolitan, but more in the sense that there are few pieces published at
all related to depression and anxiety up until 2015. From the second half
of that year and onwards, almost all of the Teen Vogue pieces mention clini-
cal diagnoses and biomedical treatments.80 Again, this seems to suggest
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that the medical discourses around mental health became more main-
stream and were assumed to be widely known from 2015 onward.
In Teen Vogue the denitional work is at times very explicit, in that they
not only mention a clinical diagnosis but also provide lists of symptoms
and other facts about the diagnosis at hand.81 An example of this, in addi-
tion to the one above about self-harm, is an article about pop group One
Direction canceling a concert because one of their members had an anxi-
ety attack. Here the magazine explainsthat “anxiety disorders affect mil-
lions of people, and panic attack symptoms can range from shortness of
breath, elevated heart rate, and even a choking feeling.”82 In the sentence,
the phrase “millions of people” links to a page on the Anxiety and
Depression Association of America’s (ADAA) website with facts and statis-
tics about anxiety and depression, which also includes links to information
sites about various specic diagnoses, such as Generalized Anxiety
Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, and Major Depressive Disorder.83 By
providing their readers with the symptoms of a panic attack and by linking
to a website aligned with the medical establishment, Teen Vogue adopts a
sort of pedagogical approach that assumes the reader might not know
exactly what constitutes a panic attack, but might benet from medical
denitions that also include information on how to treat one.
Providing Support
What also marked Teen Vogue’s approach to mental health was a dedication
to providing support to its readers, which is shown clearly in their cover-
age of the Netix series 13 Reasons Why. The show, based on the 2007
young adult novel by Jay Asher, premiered on the streaming service March
31, 2017 and received widespread attention due to its handling of teenage
suicide and mental illness. The story follows the aftermath of 17-year-old
Hannah Baker’s suicide, and the unraveling of the box of cassette tapes she
recorded leading up to her death, in which she reveals why she choose to
end her life. Baker recorded 13 tapes for 13 different people who she
claims are responsible for her suicide, and throughout the rst season, the
viewer gets to follow her surviving friend Clay Baker as he goes through
the tapes, featuring some tough scenes of sexual assault and bullying. The
series quickly became popular among teenagers and young adults, but
received criticism for glorifying suicide and risked spreading copycat
behavior and self-harm among vulnerable groups.84
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Teen Vogue published an op-ed on the day of the show’s release, in
which a suicide prevention advocate explains what is missing from the
show. In the piece, MollyKate Cline says that “the audience is shown what
not to do without examples of what they actually should do.”85 She points
specically to how Baker is never seen successfully reaching out for help to
her peers or the adults in her life and that the show fails to mention depres-
sion or other mental health issues, which are common backdrops to sui-
cide. Cline also points to the high numbers of suicide among teenagers in
the US (it is the “second leading cause of death for ages 10–24, with
5,240 attempts per day from kids grades 7–12”), stating that the best way
you can get help if you are being bullied or feeling suicidal is to tell some-
one, something she had hoped the show “would focus on instead of a
dramatic story line over getting revenge for those 13 people.”86
In 2017 Teen Vogue published 16 articles about 13 Reasons Why and the
controversy surrounding it (Cosmo did not cover the show at all). Looking
at the content of these pieces, the publication appears concerned to pro-
vide its readers with nuanced and responsible coverage of a life and death
topic. Among the articles is a set of quotes from teenagers themselves
about the show (motivated by the fact that “dozens of articles have been
written by adults, but fewer have shown the opinions of actual high school
students”) that also features input from a psychiatry professor;87 a collec-
tion of resources for getting help if you have been experiencing depression
or suicidal ideation after watching the show;88 and an interview with sui-
cide attempt survivors about the suicide scene in the series (which was
heavily criticized as overly graphic and was deleted from the rst season by
Netix in July 2019).89 All of the articles contain some version of the fol-
lowing phrase at the end: “If you or someone you know is contemplating
suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255
or text Crisis Text Line at 741-741.” Teen Vogue seems to think about
their readers’ needs for support in relation to the show, and positions itself
as a provider of that support.
The frequency with which Teen Vogue includes numbers to hotlines or
links to other resources for those in distress is signicant because it con-
tributes to the overall serious tone of the publication when it comes to
issues of mental health. In Teen Vogue 22% of articles include the phone
number for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline (or equivalents like
the Crisis Text Line and the National Eating Disorders Association
Helpline) or links to sites with further resources (like the website of the
phone hotlines or organizations like the Trevor Project, which is focused
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on helping LGBTQ-youth). This is compared to 10% of Cosmo articles
featuring similar resources.
Interesting to note in Teen Vogue’s coverage of 13 Reasons Why and of
suicide in general, is their use of the phrase “died by suicide” instead of the
commonly used “committed suicide.” The former phrase is preferred by
mental health advocates, as it removes culpability from the person who has
lost their life and opens up for discussions of the disease or disorder they
were suffering.90 By employing the language of mental health advocates,
the magazine consciously aligns itself with an anti-stigma/awareness dis-
course and acknowledges their own role as participants in the public dis-
course around mental health, including a recognition of the role of
language in shaping this discourse.
This is seen clearly in their repeated mention of ghting stigma and on
the value of speaking out about mental illness as an important step toward
normalizing mental health issues. In their reporting about celebrities
speaking out about mental health issues, for example, they tend to point
out the inherent good of talking about it. In an article about an open let-
ter written by Lady Gaga for the Born This Way Foundation’s website (a
foundation that seeks to “support the mental and emotional wellness of
young people by putting their needs, ideas, and voices rst”) about living
with PTSD, the writer recounts how Gaga shares that she is going to
therapy and is taking medication, but feels that “the most inexpensive and
perhaps the best medicine in the world is words” which is why she is
speaking up. The Teen Vogue writer, Brittney McNamara, agrees and ends
the article with the following statement:
Lady Gaga is right. Keeping mental illness a secret gives power to the stigma
that surrounds it and prevents so many people from accessing treatment.
The more we talk about these things, the more people will realize they
can—and should—get help. We’re so glad she’s been able to seek therapy,
and we hope she inspires anyone in a similar position to do the same.91
The tone here is straightforward and earnest. McNamara seems happy
for Lady Gaga and conrms the artist’s belief in the power of words for
ghting stigma and shame surrounding mental illness, conrming a logic
underlying most celebrity confessions of mental illness, something I dis-
cuss further in Chap. 4.
Teen Vogue kept the trend of providing support to its readers during the
COVID-19 pandemic, with a dedicated hub on their website titled “Days
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Derailed: The Coronavirus Crisis.”92 Here readers could nd a collection
of articles about COVID-19 and the global health crisis that has emerged
in the wake of the virus. The topics covered include what we know about
the virus, advice for dating during a pandemic, how to overcome corona-
virus anxiety, and what to do if you are quarantined with an abuser.93
Alongside these pieces about the private and the personal was also an
op-ed titled “The Coronavirus Pandemic Demonstrates the Failures of
Capitalism” and a piece detailing the disproportionate impact of
COVID-19 on the Black community.94 Like this the readers who go to
Teen Vogue for support in a time of crisis cannot avoid getting informed
also about how the unequal distribution of wealth and institutionalized
racism exacerbates the problems of the pandemic.
For the remaining part of this chapter, I will discuss how the two maga-
zines covered the same celebrity events and the same study of a popular
antidepressant. This comparison reveals the different orientations of the
two publications.
Different ApproAches tocelebrity reporting
When it comes to celebrity reporting, Cosmopolitan tends to present news
about celebrities suffering from mental illness more as traditional gossip
concerned mostly with what a particular celebrity has been up to, whereas
Teen Vogue often provides critical context and uses it as a pedagogic tool
to talk about everyone who is aficted by a specic diagnosis. For exam-
ple, both outlets reported on a series of tweets made by model and actress
Cara Delevingne in April 2016 where she wrote about her experience of
depression.95 In the tweets in question, Delevingne claries rumors about
her quitting modeling, that followed after she had previously spoken out
about being depressed while modeling and having shifted to do more act-
ing work. She wrote “I do not blame the fashion industry for anything”
and “I suffer from depression and was a model during a particularly rough
patch of self hatred.” This was followed by two more tweets elaborating
on her experience: “I am so lucky for the work I get to do but I used to
work to try and escape and just ended up completely exhausting myself”
and then “I am focusing on lming and trying to learn how to not pick
apart my every aw. I am really good at that.” Cosmopolitan’s reporting
about Delevingne’s Twitter activity focuses primarily on what she has to
say about the modeling industry.96 Their article starts with a brief sum-
mary of the acting work Delevingne has done recently and the rumors
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about her quitting modeling. Next it features all of Delevingne’s relevant
tweets (six in total) embedded into the article, before including a previous
quote from the model/actress about suffering from depression. It then
concludes by stating that Delevingne is back to modeling again, referenc-
ing an announcement that she would be the “new face” of fashion brand
Saint Laurent and including two Instagram posts from the model/actress
with photos from the campaign.
In contrast, the Teen Vogue article about the same tweets starts off by
mentioning Delevingne’s history of speaking about depression, stating in
the rst paragraph that “Being skinny and pretty, Cara has said, doesn’t
mean you can’t be depressed, nor does having a successful career you
love.” After embedding four of the tweets and quoting the one specically
about depression in the text, the Teen Vogue writer cites research that
“shows that depression is a disorder of the brain,” before elaborating:
Some research suggests that depression is caused by an imbalance of neu-
rotransmitters, the chemicals nerve cells use to talk to each other, while
other research puts some of the blame on genetics. This means that depres-
sion can affect anyone, no matter how seemingly lucky, successful, or beauti-
ful they are.97
The paragraph includes hyperlinks to one article from Psych Central
and one from Nature: International weekly journal of science to back up
the claims.98 What McNamara does here is validate Delevingne’s experi-
ence by evoking science and biomedicine to explain why someone who
seemingly “has it all” can develop depression. It also becomes a pedagogi-
cal moment about the causes of the diagnosis.
McNamara then quotes Delevingne when she previously spoke about
her depression, before embedding Delevingne’s tweet about turning to
work as an escape. She then ends the piece with the model/actress’ last
tweet, which states “I am focusing on lming and trying to learn how to
not pick apart my every aw. I am really good at that” and comments
“That’s an important lesson to learn. Self-love is a journey, and so is
depression. The good news is, neither is a journey you have to take
alone.”99 The Teen Vogue piece adopts a caring tone that assumes that the
reader is not only interested in the fact that a famous model and actress has
been depressed, but also in what it means to be depressed and how one
might get out of it.
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Another instance of celebrity reporting that reveals the different orien-
tations of the magazines is the coverage of artist Mariah Carey’s revelation
of living with bipolar II disorder in April 2018. The singer opened up in
an interview with the celebrity magazine People and both Cosmo and Teen
Vogue published their own articles recapping what she had revealed to the
other magazine (a common form of celebrity reporting).100 The two out-
lets use several of the same quotes from Carey and provide the same gen-
eral background facts: the singer was rst diagnosed in 2001 but did not
seek treatment until recently, after having experienced “the hardest couple
of years” she had ever been through. Teen Vogue’s piece, however, is almost
twice the length of Cosmo’s and provides context to both mental health
stigma and the bipolar II diagnosis. The Teen Vogue article starts with a
three-sentence paragraph about the stigma surrounding mental health.
Here the author describes how stigma might make the one suffering “feel
isolated, ashamed, and even terried that no one else can understand your
internal struggles” and claries that mental illnesses “don’t discriminate,
and truly can affect anyone and everyone, including celebrities who might
seem to have ‘perfect’ lives.”101 Carey and her newly revealed diagnosis are
not named until the second paragraph, where the facts of her case are
stated. The Cosmo article, on the other hand, gets straight to the point as
it starts with a two-sentence paragraph that states when Carey rst got her
diagnosis and that she did not get treatment at the time. In Cosmo stigma
is only mentioned indirectly when the singer is quoted as having said “I’m
hopeful we can get to a place where the stigma is lifted from people going
through anything alone,” but the magazine does not provide its own
commentary on the issue of mental health stigma, like Teen Vogue does.
The two publications differ also in how they write about Carey’s spe-
cic diagnosis. Teen Vogue introduces the issue as follows:
She specically struggles with bipolar II disorder, which involves periods of
depression and hypomania, and is different than bipolar I.According to the
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), bipolar II is ‘dened by a
pattern of depressive episodes and hypomanic episodes, but not full-blown
manic episodes.’102
In this paragraph the phrase “bipolar II disorder” links to the WebMD
site for this specic diagnosis and the title “National Institute of Mental
Health” links to that organization’s information page for the broader
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spectrum of bipolar disorder. In the Cosmo article, the only denition of
bipolar II that is given is that it “involves depression and hypomania.”103
Teen Vogue here seems concerned to give its readers direct information
about what bipolar II disorder entails, including differentiating it from
other bipolar diagnoses, as well as directing them to sites with more medi-
cal facts about the issue, including treatment options. Cosmo, on the other
hand, is not as concerned about such details, assuming the reader knows
or does not care about the difference between bipolar I and II, or what
depression and hypomania entail.
This speaks to the difference between the two publications when it
comes to providing denitions of the ailments that are discussed. As men-
tioned above, clinical diagnoses are mentioned in the majority of pieces in
both outlets from 2015 and onwards, which seems to suggest that the
medical discourses around mental health became more mainstream and
were assumed to be widely known from then on. In Teen Vogue the men-
tion of clinical diagnoses is repeatedly accompanied by direct denitions of
diagnoses, like the ones above, with links to medical sites like WebMD or
featuring a quote from an expert (such as a doctor or counselor). This
happens in 9% of the Teen Vogue articles, which is not an overwhelming
amount, but compares to zero such instances in Cosmopolitan. In the lat-
ter outlet the denitional work is instead happening indirectly in the vari-
ous ways the issues are being presented. As in the listicles discussed above,
for example, the reader gets an idea of what it entails to be depressed or
anxious by reading each item on the list. This is also pedagogical in that it
provides symptoms and denitions, but these come primarily from the
Cosmo writers’ personal experiences and not from experts or textbook
denitions as in Teen Vogue.
A criticAl AnDAnot-so-criticAl stAnce towArD
thephArmAceuticAl inDustry
Another example that highlights the differences between the magazines is
found in both of their coverage of a research report about the antidepres-
sant drug Paroxetine, which is sold under the brand name Paxil. Comparing
how the two outlets choose to write about it shows Teen Vogue’s critical
stance and Cosmo’s lack of one.
The study in question was a reevaluation of a study about the efcacy
and harms of Paxil in the treatment of major depression in teens that was
conducted in North America from 1994 to 1998 and published as an
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article in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent
Psychiatry (JAACAP) in 2001.104 This study, named study 329, was funded
by the pharmaceutical company that produced the drug, GlaxoSmithKline
(GSK), and concluded that Paxil was safe and efcient for use by children
and teenagers (despite the drug only having received FDA-approval for
adult use). Study 329 was then used by GSK from 1998-2003 to market
the “off-label” use of Paxil in the treatment of children and adolescents,
resulting in more than two million prescriptions being made out to teens
in 2002 alone.105 The study became controversial early on, with a FDA
ofcer writing in a formal review of the trial that “on balance, this trial
should be considered as a failed trial, in that neither active treatment group
showed superiority over placebo by a statistically signicant margin.”106 It
was then revealed that the paper published in JAACAP under the name of
22 academics, with Brown University’s then chief of psychiatry Martin
Keller as the lead author, was in fact written by a PR rm hired by GSK
and had been composed so as to downplay the negative effects of the
drug.107 In 2004 the FDA even added an explicit warning against prescrib-
ing Paxil to children and teens due to the risk of suicidal ideation and self-
harm.108 And in 2012 the US Department of Justice settled a lawsuit
against GSK where they pleaded guilty to fraud in their off-label market-
ing of Paxil and other drugs, paying a record breaking $3 billion in nes.109
The study that was being covered by Cosmopolitan and Teen Vogue was
published in 2015 and looks at the raw data behind the original study 329,
denitely concluding that Paxil is no more efcient at treating depression
in teens and kids than a placebo and that it can potentially lead to suicide
and self-harm.110 What is interesting for the purposes of this discussion is
the way the different magazines write about this research. Cosmopolitan’s
piece is titled “This Really Common Antidepressant Could Cause Life-
Threatening Side Effects” and starts by stating “Chances are you know
someone who takes some sort of medication to treat depression” before
briey accounting for the results of the study. In the fourth paragraph the
article addresses the reader directly and states “if you’re currently taking
Paxil, you probably don’t give AF [a fuck] about how or why the original
analysis went wrong—you’re wondering whether you should trash your
prescription.”111 The question is answered rmly in the following para-
graph: “The denitive answer is ‘no’” followed by an explanation of how
sudden withdrawal can increase risk of suicide, and a clarication that Paxil
and other SSRIs are not being banned but that more research is called for.
And if that was not enough, the piece ends with a clear injunction to only
change your medications if there is a problem:
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So if you’ve been taking Paxil for more than a few weeks and you’re feeling
perfectly ne, there’s no reason to freak out—it’s unlikely you’ll have any
problems on your current dose. But if your antidepressant medication is
making you feel way worse, talk to the doctor who prescribed it ASAP.112
Interestingly, the Cosmopolitan writer only mentions that the study had
to do with teenage consumers of Paxil briey when explaining that the
new research “re-examined the medical records of 275 adolescent patients
with major depression who were involved in the original study.” This
leaves the impression that the research applies to all takers of the drug,
even though the dangers being laid out in the reevaluation of the original
Study 329 only applies to teenagers, and not to adult consumers.
The Teen Vogue article about the study instead puts the adolescent
aspect front and center with the headline “A Popular Antidepressant Is
Actually Deadly for Teens.” The writer of the piece, Julie Pennell, also
highlights the malpractice of the drug company behind Paxil, starting the
article with the following statement:
When you aren’t feeling well and need to get better, you look to your doctor
to make sure you get the right medicine. Your doctor looks at research to
make sure he or she gives you the right prescription, but what if the research
they’re presented with is sneakily awed?113
Pennell then attempts to account for the troubled history of study 329
and the marketing of Paxil to children and teens. She does this by men-
tioning pharmaceutical company GSK by name, that they were the ones
funding the research, and then presented it to downplay the risks and used
it to push for the off-label use of the drug. The article also refers to the $3
billion ne paid by the company and the FDA warnings about the poten-
tial suicide risk for teens and children taking Paxil. Cosmopolitan did not
mention any of these specic factors and only vaguely criticized how the
pharmaceutical company acted by including a quote from one of the
researchers behind the new study saying the ndings reveal “how industry
hypes drug benets that might not exist and goes about hiding harms."114
In the Teen Vogue article Pennell explains that the drug is still available
for adults to use and then states:
drug companies are trying to change the law around marketing their medi-
cations for off-label uses. Seeing how dangerous Paxil could be for teens
however, this can be a very slippery slope. Make sure that you research the
medication your doctor prescribes to you, and even get a second opinion.115
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And after citing the New York Times on links between psychiatric drugs
and violent acts including suicide (but also mentioning that experts say
that there is not enough correlation to draw a straight line between drugs
and action), she ends the article stating that “this is scary, and incredibly
disheartening to hear that a major drug company would gamble with the
lives of teens just for prots.” Not only is the tone in this piece serious in
Teen Vogue’s typical way, but it is also pointedly critical of this particular
drug company and the pharmaceutical industry in general.
While the Cosmopolitan article focused primarily on the individual aspects
of taking the drug, directly encouraging their readers to question Paxil only
if they had had problems while taking it, the Teen Vogue piece highlights the
role of the pharmaceutical company in a much clearer way. Like this, the
latter outlet gives the reader a more comprehensive picture of all of the
actors involved in developing and prescribing psychiatric medication.
This is also an example of Teen Vogue reporting on new research and
not taking the ndings at hand solely at their face value, but adding cri-
tique that puts them in perspective. In a similar vein, the outlet reported
on new research that showed depression can cause physical pain in March
2016, and here the author points out that “while people with depression
have known for a long time that the disorder affects the whole body, this
is the rst study to prove that depression is actually a systemic disease
rather than just a mental one.”116 Here Teen Vogue points to the discrepan-
cies between the rsthand knowledge of many folks living with depression
(about the physical effects of depression) and scientic research about the
diagnosis. This becomes an indirect critique of the sometimes- narrow
frame of health research and foregrounds the lived experience of depres-
sion in favor of a blind trust in scientic institutions.
Another example comes from Teen Vogue’s reporting on research about
depression and suicide rates among transgender kids, rates which the study
at hand suggests can be lowered if trans kids are given support and shown
acceptance. The Teen Vogue writer importantly points out that this dis-
proves “theories that being transgender is inherently bad for mental
health” and adds “though many didn’t need research to tell them to
accept their family members, neighbors, friends, or community members
who are transgender, we now have the numbers to tell those who do.”117
Here McNamara manages to bring attention to the connection between
mental health and structural discrimination, implicitly showing how trans-
phobia directly affects the psychic wellbeing of transgender persons. In
this way Teen Vogue might be seen as modeling a way of responsibly report-
ing on mental illness and its correlation with structural discrimination.
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conclusion
In this chapter I have discussed the differences in style, tone, narrative,
mode of address, and types of pedagogy and support around depression,
anxiety, and general mental health in Cosmopolitan and Teen Vogue. The
general increase in coverage in both outlets and the mention of specic
diagnoses from 2015 and onwards suggests that mental illnesses were con-
sidered to be obvious aspects of contemporary life from that point on.
This is signicant because in previous eras mental health and illness have
been stigmatized subjects that have not been acknowledged as parts of
everyday life, and women’s magazines have tended to focus on the positive
and upbeat, rather than the negative aspects of life.
In Cosmopolitan, the tone tended to be lighthearted, distanced, and
relatable, following the magazine’s brand of a tongue-in-cheek approach
to all aspects of life. Here the relatable self118 that acknowledges the dif-
culties of contemporary life in a nonthreatening way is clearly present,
especially in the outlet’s listicles that frequently use humor to disarm the
seriousness of the topics covered. The approach here was often one that
presented mental illness as both exceptional and common, clearly marked
as different than “just being sad” but also as common as any physical ill-
ness. The Cosmo pieces that did take a more serious tone were the personal
stories that tended to follow the victim-to-victor narrative found in anti-
stigma campaigns, where the protagonist starts out by suffering, then
receives a diagnosis, and is nally salvaged by the help of medication and
therapy. In addition to constructing psychiatry and psychology as the sav-
iors, as traditional anti-stigma narratives, Cosmo offered examples that
instead constructed mediated technologies like YouTube as the primary
mode of support from suffering.
The overall tone in Teen Vogue was more serious, shown in the preva-
lence of general interest stories, a recurring critical perspective, the focus
on support, and the direct alignment with mental health awareness and
advocacy discourses. By placing general interest stories, such as the one
about incarcerated teen Bresha Meadows, alongside more personal and
individual-focused pieces the reader learns to include also structural issues
in the scope of mental health. The Teen Vogue pieces also tend to include
critical commentary in addition to the straightforward reporting, which
becomes a pedagogical moment about not only the prevalence and causes
of various mental illnesses but also their connections to structural issues
such as mass incarceration and racial oppression.
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A comparison of how the two outlets covered the same celebrity events
and science report further showed their differences in tone. Here it became
clear that Teen Vogue tended to provide readers with more context to the
issues affecting the celebrities discussed, whereas Cosmo treated them
more as traditional celebrity reporting about the specic events that
passed. In their coverage of the Paxil study, Cosmopolitan wrote about the
report in general terms that briey accounted for the new research nd-
ings before advising their readers to only switch medications if they were
having issues. Teen Vogue on the other hand took a critical stance toward
the pharmaceutical company responsible for the deceptive marketing of
the drug and accounted for several of the details about the legislative chal-
lenges to the company and the study, as well as the general practice of
pharmaceutical companies prioritizing prots over individuals’ health
matters. Like this, the latter outlet gives their readers a comprehensive
picture of all of the actors involved in developing and prescribing psychi-
atric medication and encourages them to adopt a critical and “woke”
mindset toward “big pharma.”
The examination of these publications’ 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 did offer a more nuanced por-
trayal of mental illness that incited its readers to a more critical and engaged
interpretation of dominant mental health paradigms. In this sense Cosmo
provides an example of protable vulnerability in that it aligns itself with
the trendy themes of depression, anxiety, and other diagnoses, while main-
taining a comfortable distance that avoids striking a too somber or heavy
tone. The vulnerability acknowledged here is one that largely has already
been dealt with or is one step on the road toward becoming condent and
resilient again.119 Teen Vogue, on the other hand, does offer more spacious
denitions of mental illness that does not shy away from difcult conversa-
tions. With their focus on support and their providing of resources (such
as hotline numbers), they instead can be seen as giving their readers life-
saving information to assist in bettering their mental health. They are then
more aligned with the critical sad girl culture found on social media and
discussed in Chap. 5.
The study of Cosmopolitan’s and Teen Vogue’s approach to mental health
during this time further underscores the increase in conversations around
mental health from 2015 and onwards. As I will discuss further in the fol-
lowing chapter in relation to celebrities, this can be tied to changes in
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branding strategies when it comes to relatability. In a changing media
landscape, where social media is dominating more and more of people’s
media consumption, traditional media outlets like the ones discussed here
also turn to more intimate themes and topics, of which mental illness is the
latest addition.
notes
1. Duffy, Remake, Remodel, 3.
2. McRobbie, “Jackie Magazine.”
3. Ibid, 69.
4. Duffy, Remake, Remodel.
5. Ballaster et al., Women’s Worlds; Currie, Girl Talk; Ferguson, Forever
Feminine; Gough-Yates, Understanding Women’s Magazines; McCracken,
Decoding Women’s Magazines.
6. Bordo, Unbearable Weight; Wolf, The Beauty Myth.
7. Bhattacharyya, Sexuality and Society; Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny;
Onwurah, “Sexist, Racist and Above All Capitalist.”
8. McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism.
9. Gill, “Post-Postfeminism?;” Orgad and Gill, Condence Culture.
10. Gill, “Mediated Intimacy and Postfeminism,” 365.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid, 362.
13. Ibid, 362.
14. Coulter and Moruzi, “Woke Girls,” 6.
15. My analysis involved categorizing the articles in each outlet according to
the form they took, and I refer to percentages throughout this chapter
which largely refers back to this analytical work.
16. Hill, “Ask Logan;” Simmons, “Ask Rachel.”
17. Barker, Gill, and Harvey, Mediated Intimacy; Ouellette and Hay, Better
Living Through Reality TV.
18. Zimmerman, “How Cosmo Conquered the World.”
19. Machin and Thornborrow, “Branding and Discourse: The Case of
Cosmopolitan.”
20. Ibid, 454.
21. Poole, “Top nine things you need to know about 'listicles.'”
22. Breslaw, “10 Things You Should Never Say To Someone With
Depression;” Koman, “10 Things You Should Never Say To Someone
With Anxiety.”
23. Dingle, “17 Things to Never Say to a Girl With Borderline Personality
Disorder;” Koman, “13 Things Not to Say to Someone Who Is Stressed
Out;” Peyser, “10 Things You Should Not Say To Someone With An
Eating Disorder.”
F. THELANDERSSON

93
24. Breslaw, “10 Things You Should Never Say To Someone With
Depression,” italicization in original.
25. Peyser, “16 Things Only Girls On Antidepressants Will Understand;”
Peyser, “14 Struggles Only Girls With Anxiety Will Understand;” Peyser,
“12 Struggles Only Girls With Depression Will Understand.”
26. Smothers, “17 Dating Struggles Girls With Anxiety Understand;”
Pugachevsky, “12 Dating Struggles Only Girls With ADHD Will
Understand.”
27. Peyser, “16 Things Only Girls On Antidepressants Will Understand,”
italicization in original.
28. Machin and Thornborrow, “Branding and Discourse: The Case of
Cosmopolitan.” I return to the function of humor in relation to mental
health in Chap. 5, where I discuss how humor is used among social media
users writing about their sadness and various mental illnesses diagno-
ses online.
29. Moore, “13 Things I Wish I Knew About Depression When I Was a
Teenager.”
30. Peyser, “12 Struggles Only Girls With Depression Will Understand.”
31. Breslaw, “10 Things You Should Never Say To Someone With
Depression.”
32. Moore, “13 Things I Wish I Knew About Depression When I Was a
Teenager.”
33. Breslaw, “10 Things You Should Never Say To Someone With
Depression.”
34. Blackman, “Psychiatric culture and bodies of resistance.”
35. Kanai, “Girlfriendship and sameness;” Kanai, “The best friend, the boy-
friend, other girls, hot guys, and creeps;” Kanai, Gender and Relatability
in Digital Culture.
36. Gill and Kanai, “Mediating Neoliberal Capitalism,” 321.
37. Ibid, 322.
38. Peyser, “16 Things Only Girls On Antidepressants Will Understand,”
italicization in original.
39. Blackman, “Psychiatric culture and bodies of resistance.”
40. Justich, “Why I Turn to YouTube When My Anxiety Gets Out of
Control.”
41. Ibid.
42. Blackman, “Self-help, media cultures and the production of female psy-
chopathology;” Hochschild, “The Commercial Spirit of Intimate Life.”
43. Hochschild, “The Commercial Spirit of Intimate Life,” 3.
44. Ibid, 13, italicization in original.
45. Ibid, 13.
46. Ibid, 14.
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47. Blackman, “Self-help, media cultures and the production of female psy-
chopathology,” 225.
48. Ibid, 225.
49. SACCONEJOLYs, Youtube channel, accessed June 27, 2022, https://
www.youtube.com/c/sacconejolys.
50. Justich, “Why I Turn to YouTube When My Anxiety Gets Out of
Control.”
51. Banet-Weiser, Empowered.
52. Blackman, “Self-help, media cultures and the production of female psy-
chopathology,” 230.
53. Epstein, “How to Beat the Winter Blues.”
54. That year 35% of their articles mention a clinical diagnosis, which goes up
to 61% in 2014, 78% in 2015 and 2016, down to 77% in 2017, and then
up to 81% in 2018.
55. Koman, “This Mom's Powerful Sele Proves There's No Shame in
Taking Anxiety Medication.”
56. Coulter and Moruzi, “Woke Girls,” 6.
57. Banet-Weiser, Empowered, 103.
58. Duca, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America.”
59. Banet-Weiser, Empowered, 104.
60. Teen Vogue, website, accessed June 27, 2022, https://www.teen-
vogue.com.
61. Hinchliffe, “The dissonance between Vogue and Teen Vogue is nally
too loud to ignore.”
62. Coulter and Moruzi, “Woke Girls,” 1.
63. Ibid, 7.
64. Pulliam-Moore, “How 'woke' went from black activist watchword to
teen internet slang.”
65. Ashlee, Zamora, and Karikari, ”We are woke,” 90.
66. Coulter and Moruzi, “Woke Girls,” 7.
67. Ibid, 7.
68. McNamara, “Accepting Transgender Kids Will Lower Depression and
Suicide Rates;” McNamara, “Majority of Americans Say Racial
Discrimination Is the Cause of Their Rising Stress.”
69. Sinay, “‘Telepsychiatry’ Lets Therapists Treat Your Mental Health Over
Skype, FaceTime;” McNamara, “Hospital Gets Sued for Discrimination
After Transgender Teen Suicide.”
70. McNamara, “Bresha Meadows Will Be Transferred to a Mental Health
Facility.”
71. Justice Policy Institute, “Incarcerating Youth can Aggravate Crime and
Frustrate Education, Employment and Health for Young People.”
72. McNamara, “Bresha Meadows Will Be Transferred to a Mental Health
Facility.”
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73. Quinn, “26 Date Ideas for Your Anxious Partner.”
74. 6% of the Teen Vogue articles are collaborations with this site.
75. Blades, “11 Things You Can Do To Help Black Lives Matter End Police
Violence.”
76. Szpitalak, “11 Things You Can Do to Avoid Self-Harm.”
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Mei, “Demi Lovato Opens Up About Her Struggles with Addiction,
Bulimia, and Bipolar Disorder;” Narins “This Really Common
Antidepressant Could Cause Life-Threatening Side Effects;” Peyser,
“What I Learned From Posting About My Mental Illness on Social Media.”
80. In 2015 70% of their articles mention a clinical diagnosis, which goes up
to 82% in 2016, 93% in 2017, and down to 91% in 2018.
81. This kind of explicit denitions appear in 9% of their pieces.
82. Ceron, “This Might Be Why Liam Payne Cancelled One Direction's
Concert On Tuesday.”
83. ADAA, “Anxiety Disorders- Facts & Statistics,” website, accessed June
25, 2022, https://adaa.org/understanding- anxiety/facts- statistics.
84. Saint Louis, “For Families of Teens at Suicide Risk.”
85. Cline, “This Is What's Missing From '13 Reasons Why,'” italicization in
original.
86. Ibid.
87. Gross, “What Teens Think of '13 Reasons Why.'”
88. McNamara, “Mental Health Resources For People Triggered By ‘13
Reasons Why.’”
89. Brito, “Netix deletes Hannah Baker death scene in Season 1 nale;”
Herman, “Survivors Explain What Was Wrong With the ‘13 Reasons
Why’ Suicide Scene.”
90. Spector, “Why mental health advocates use the words 'died by suicide.'”
91. McNamara, “Lady Gaga Penned a Letter About Living With PTSD.”
92. Teen Vogue, “Days Derailed: The Coronavirus Crisis,” website, accessed
June 28, 2022, https://www.teenvogue.com/collection/coronavirus.
93. Aronowitz, “Dating and Coronavirus;” Diavolo, “Coronavirus and
COVID-19;” Flynn, “What to Do if You're Isolated With an Abuser
During the Coronavirus Crisis;” McNamara, “Coronavirus Anxiety.”
94. Mallett, “The Coronavirus Pandemic Demonstrates the Failures of
Capitalism;” Nasheed, “The Coronavirus Is Killing Black Americans In
Alarming Numbers.”
95. McNamara, “Cara Delevingne Takes to Twitter to Talk About Her
Depression;” Storey, “Cara Delevingne Opens Up About Depression.”
96. Storey, “Cara Delevingne Opens Up About Depression.”
97. McNamara, “Cara Delevingne Takes to Twitter to Talk About Her
Depression.”
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98. Hyman, ”Mental health: Depression needs large human-genetics stud-
ies;” Spielmans, “Research Updates: Depression.”
99. McNamara, “Cara Delevingne Takes to Twitter to Talk About Her
Depression.”
100. Baty, “Mariah Carey Opens up About Her Struggle With Bipolar Disorder;”
Belle, “Mariah Carey Opened Up About Having Bipolar Disorder.”
101. Belle, “Mariah Carey Opened Up About Having Bipolar Disorder.”
102. Ibid.
103. Baty, “Mariah Carey Opens up About Her Struggle With Bipolar Disorder.”
104. Keller etal, “Efcacy of Paroxetine in the Treatment of Adolescent Major
Depression;” Le Noury etal, “Restoring Study 329.”
105. Doshi, “No correction, no retraction, no apology, no comment.”
106. Mosholder, “Clinical Review: Paxil.”
107. Doshi, “No correction, no retraction, no apology, no comment.”
108. Belluz, “Researchers said a popular antidepressant was safe for teens.”
109. U.S.Department of Justice, “GlaxoSmithKline to Plead Guilty and Pay
$3 Billion to Resolve Fraud Allegations and Failure to Report Safety Data.”
110. Le Noury etal, “Restoring Study 329.”
111. Narins, “This Really Common Antidepressant Could Cause Life-
Threatening Side Effects.”
112. Ibid.
113. Pennell, “A Popular Antidepressant Is Actually Deadly for Teens.”
114. Narins, “This Really Common Antidepressant Could Cause Life-
Threatening Side Effects.”
115. Pennell, “A Popular Antidepressant Is Actually Deadly for Teens.”
116. McNamara, “Depression Causes Physical Pain.”
117. McNamara, “Accepting Transgender Kids Will Lower Depression and
Suicide Rates.”
118. Kanai, Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture; Gill and Kanai,
“Mediating Neoliberal Capitalism.”
119. Orgad and Gill, Condence Culture; McRobbie, Feminism and the Politics
of Resilience.
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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and
indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to
the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence
and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the
permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copy-
right holder.
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CHAPTER 4
Celebrity Mental Health: Intimacy,
Ordinariness, andRepeated
Self- Transformation
While magazines directly (and indirectly) tell us what to do, celebrity
reporting functions in a similar pedagogical way by showing audiences
how famous people act in certain situations. When celebrities share their
personal health struggles, scholars have argued that they serve three main
functions: education, inspiration, and activism/advocacy.1 This is the logic
presented at face value by celebrities themselves and those actively telling
their stories——that when a famous person comes out and reveals that
they are suffering, they communicate to fans that it is okay to feel that way
and ideally inspire them to seek help. Teen Vogue’s insistence on the impor-
tance of speaking out and ghting the stigma discussed in the previous
chapter is an example of this. So is Lady Gaga’s statement in conjunction
with revealing that she lives with PTSD that “the most inexpensive and
perhaps the best medicine in the world is words.”2 Other scholars have
added that celebrity health narratives also do ideological work in that they
present “images and ideas about how we should interpret, manage and
value mental illness as well as the identities of those who suffer from it.”3
This chapter focuses on female celebrities4 who have spoken out about
their own mental illness, by looking at the very public struggles of singers
Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez. It also briey discusses the employment
of a sad aesthetic by artist Lana del Rey. These cases and the overall rise in
celebrity expressions about mental health can be tied to a turn in celebrity
branding around authenticity and intimacy. Together with the previous
chapter, it shows how media and pop cultural attention to mental health is
linked to changes in branding strategies around relatability. This chapter
© The Author(s) 2023
F. Thelandersson, 21st Century Media and Female Mental Health,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16756-0_4

104
shows that, just as there was an increase in magazine coverage of mental
illness from 2015 and on, there was a spike in celebrity confessions about
various psychiatric diagnoses around this time.
Within the original time frames of this research project, 2008-2018,
105 female celebrities who had spoken out about various experiences of
mental illness were identied.5 Since the original cut-off point, the list has
steadily become longer, with more and more famous individuals sharing
their struggles with the world. Among these are people like entertainer
Paris Hilton (who revealed a traumatic history of childhood abuse), royal
Meghan Markle (who in an infamous Oprah interview shared that she had
been suicidal), and athlete Naomi Osaka (who took a break from tennis
due to mental health issues).6
Just as with this book’s general scope, the focus here is on American
celebrities or those with a global appeal. In the original group of celebri-
ties, 78% were white, 12% black, 5% latinx, and 5% mixed race. In other
words, the majority of women celebrities who have spoken out about their
mental health are white. The subject that gets to be open about her dif-
culties, tends to be white or white-passing.
Among the original 105 celebrities, the most common diagnosis men-
tioned was anxiety, closely followed by depression, as well as those having
suffered both anxiety and depression. There were also several accounts of
living with postpartum depression and bipolar disorder.7 Other diagnoses
and experiences that occurred were social anxiety, suicidal ideation, self-
harm, eating disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Among
these categories several overlapped, meaning the same person might have
talked about having multiple diagnoses. There were also a few cases where
stars had only talked about mental health in general, but still made it to
several compilation lists of celebrities speaking out, and they are thus also
included here.
Changes over Time: FromspeCulaTions
ToConFessions
The majority of these celebrity confessions took place toward the end of
the decade, with a clear increase in 2015 and onwards. The stars included
here have all spoken rsthand about their own experiences of depression,
anxiety, or other diagnoses. These confessions primarily took place in
interviews with magazines, but also at times on social media, with stars
F. THELANDERSSON

105
revealing diagnoses directly to their fans on their personal accounts, like
the case of Cara Delevingne discussed in the previous chapter. Some also
happened in memoirs (that were subsequently reported on by media cov-
ering celebrities), rst-person essays in the popular press, press statements
in relation to a rehab or hospital stay, participation in mental health aware-
ness campaigns, on personal apps, and on reality television shows.8
Looking at celebrity reporting around 2008–2009, a lot of it was dedi-
cated to female stars who seemed to go through mental distress, but they
rarely came forward themselves to speak about what they were dealing
with; instead, it was the media speculating about what particular diagnosis
someone might have had. This creates a different kind of celebrity health
narrative than when the star herself speaks out, since speculations from
others always can be denied, but rsthand statements tend to be carefully
crafted to t within the celebrity’s overall brand. Su Holmes and Diane
Negra have pointed to the “intensely and negatively scrutinizing public
gaze [that] was trained so often on female celebrities in a practice that
reached fever pitch in 2008.”9 A fever pitch that was not an “accident of
historical timing” but a way of misdirecting anxieties and blame for the
global nancial crisis and instead position “female celebrity as itself an
overvalued and depreciating asset.”10 In this way, famous women took the
heat for the public’s anxieties about the nancial system and the tab-
loidized press used its investigative functions to examine female “train-
wrecks” rather than economic institutions.
The trainwrecks that received scrutinized attention were often sus-
pected of suffering from mental health challenges. For example, one of the
most closely watched public breakdowns at the start of 2008 was that of
singer Britney Spears, which (could be said) to have peaked in February
2007 when she shaved her head in front of scores of paparazzi photogra-
phers who spread the news worldwide overnight.11 During 2008 Spears
was committed to a psychiatric ward twice and then put under a conserva-
torship in which her father Jamie Spears had ultimate authority over her
nances and most personal decisions, something she lived with for over 13
years.12
2010-2011 saw the peak of former child actor Lindsay Lohan’s life
descending into chaos, with her spending time in rehab and jail multiple
times.13 Around this time the world also saw singer Amy Winehouse rise
to stardom and break down in public, ending with her death by alcohol
poisoning in 2011.14 In 2013 and 2014 former child actor Amanda Bynes
went through a very public breakdown involving several highly publicized
4 CELEBRITY MENTAL HEALTH: INTIMACY, ORDINARINESS…

106
drug binges and court battles with her parents.15 Several of these female
celebrities appeared among the sad girls on Tumblr that I discuss in the
following chapter. On this digital platform users would post images of
these stars (often in states of distress) in ways that idolized them and rein-
forced a melancholic notion of sadness as romantic, mystical, and
inspirational.16
In most of these cases of public breakdown, the speculations about the
famous women’s mental health were done by observers and not by the
women themselves. What started to change around 2015 was that celebri-
ties themselves began to “come out” and address their own mental health
in large numbers. One example of how attitudes about celebrities and
mental illness changed toward the end of the decade is singer Mariah
Carey’s revelation of a bipolar II diagnosis to People magazine in April
2018 (the coverage of which I discussed in the previous chapter).17
Throughout her 25-year career, the singer had gone through two highly
publicized marriages, a divorce, and a televised mental breakdown but did
not speak out directly about her mental health until 2018, despite having
received her diagnosis already in 2001.18 The case of actress Brittany Snow
is another example. She opened up about her experiences of anorexia and
depression to People magazine in 2007, but the public’s reaction was so
harsh that she decided to take a break from the spotlight.19 In an interview
with InStyle magazine in 2019 she admitted that she had spoken “too
early,” saying that “I think there was still a stigma around sharing so much
truth, and it kind of got seen as me being self-indulgent or trying to gain
attention.”20 Something her interviewer describes as “Snow was speaking
out about mental health and pulling back the curtain on a deeply personal
experience during a time when society was much less receptive to conver-
sations about mental illness.”21 This reects not only an awareness in the
media in 2019 about mental health issues and how to write about them,
but also an idea of the media at large as now being more responsible than
it used to be in regard to these topics. Rather than engage in sensationalist
coverage of breakdowns and trainwrecks, celebrity reporting assumed a
more careful approach to issues of mental illness, indirectly informed by
discourses of mental health awareness and advocacy. The increase in con-
versations around mental illness in popular media like Cosmopolitan and
Teen Vogue, and among celebrities, served to normalize issues like depres-
sion and anxiety. One can imagine that portraying a suffering celebrity as
an outrageous trainwreck became less appealing, as it in the process of
normalization also is assumed that stars and regular people alike are
F. THELANDERSSON

107
aficted by the issues. Portraying stars who live with mental illness as
something to be shocked by (as the sensationalist trainwreck coverage
does) assumes that the reader cannot relate to what the celebrity is going
through and positions the audience at a distance, gawking at the spectacle
of a famous person breaking down. When mental illnesses instead are con-
sidered common and something that can affect everyone, the coverage of
celebrities going through such things takes a relatable approach that serves
to present the famous person as “just like us” in their suffering. This is also
indicative of a larger shift toward more ordinariness in celebrity branding
and reporting, something propelled by the prevalence of social media,
which I discuss further below.
I would also argue that this shift in approach to mental illness, speci-
cally the tendency of celebrities themselves to speak in rst person about
their struggles, played a large part in mobilizing the #FreeBritney-
movement that ultimately led to the dissolution of her conservatorship.
The fan-led movement called attention to the wellbeing of Britney Spears
under the conservatorship controlled by her father, in which the majority
of her life was under his command and decision-making.22 The image of
Britney accessible to her fans was largely mediated through Instagram,
which from 2015 and on became a minor cultural phenomenon, leading
to the start of a podcast dedicated solely to interpreting the singer’s activ-
ity on the platform.23 At a time when other stars provided rsthand
accounts of past troubles and ongoing diagnoses, Britney posted low-res
seles, inspirational quotes, and videos of herself dancing at the same spot
in her house, with very little seemingly real info about what was going on
in her life. The fans knew she had had a breakdown and then been placed
under the conservatorship, but at no point had she herself sat down for a
rst-person confessional interview, or even produced a social media post in
that vein, which in a media landscape ripe with those kinds of confessions
stood out. I contend that the discrepancy between the way Britney’s men-
tal health was mediated and the prevalence of celebrity talk about mental
illness——in the sense that her psychic wellbeing was NOT directly
addressed at a time when this was a popular topic in celebrity media——
contributed to the success of the #FreeBritney-movement and the ulti-
mate dissolution of her conservatorship in November 2021.24
It is also important to note that celebrities suffering from mental ill-
nesses is not a new phenomenon. In the early modern and romantic
period, madness was a sign of the melancholy philosopher-artist and of the
genius of the Byronic iconoclastic artist.25 The connection between
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108
mental distress and creativity and talent continued into the twentieth cen-
tury,26 and at the start of the twenty-rst century, “psychic turmoil is [still]
taken as a sign of artistic authenticity.”27 Often “suffering, dysfunction or
the personal aw, once concealed but now revealed to the public” are just
as important elements to the celebrity story as high achievement.28 Stories
about stars who “make it through” often encourage values of individual
autonomy and self-mastery29 and end up reinforcing “neoliberal ideolo-
gies of meritocracy and competitive individualism.”30 But narratives of
celebrities struggling with mental illnesses have tended to be heavily gen-
dered, working mostly in the favor of male stars. Nina K.Martin notes
that the breakdowns of male celebrities often are considered “fascinating,
demonstrating behavior that shores up stereotypical hetero-masculinity
(promiscuity and cheating, aggression and rage, linked with drugs and
alcoholism).”31 Overcoming scandal in this context is a sign of heroism,
while “women’s attempts to overcome their foibles are viewed as signiers
of tragic instability and madness.”32 Gaston Franssen points out that the
same “ideology of competitive individualism” is at play for both male and
female breakdowns, but “with clear gendered differences: psychological
instability for male artists is associated with perseverance, credibility and
authenticity; for female artists, mental breakdown is seen as a sign of fail-
ure, inherent instability or a lack of resilience.”33
Franssen analyzes Demi Lovato’s celebrity health narrative and argues
that it is an exceptional story within the traditionally gendered discourses
mentioned above, because the star has managed to incorporate mental
distress into their brand in a way that has “ensured that she is perceived as
a self-condent artist and a successful entrepreneur of self-care.”34 I will
return to Franssen’s analysis of Lovato below and build upon that with my
own. I argue that Lovato’s story (of repeated breakdown, recovery, and
reinvention) is becoming less exceptional and more common among
female* stars. Stories of trauma and difculties serve to make celebrities
more authentic and relatable, exemplifying a protable vulnerability where
difcult subjects become integral to the star brand.
a Changing CelebriTy media landsCape
It is also worth noting how celebrity reporting itself has changed through-
out the 2010s and the role of social media in its evolvement. In 2008
celebrity journalism was dominated by blogs like Perez Hilton and TMZ,
which were ready to publish the most sensationalist stories, with little
F. THELANDERSSON

109
concern over how it would affect the stars themselves. Celebrity scholar
Anne Helen Petersen has described how celebrities experienced this as
being (almost) completely out of control, with paparazzi willing to step
over dead bodies to get valuable photos of their subjects (a spate of car
crashes involving photographers and celebrities underscored this senti-
ment).35 As the 2010s progressed, however, stars learned to utilize their
own social media channels to circumvent the control of the paparazzi and
the unscrupulous gossip blogs. Toward the end of the decade traditional
outlets were reporting on what the stars were doing on social media, creat-
ing stories based on celebrities’ Instagram posts and tweets.36
This goes hand in hand with Marwick and boyd’s analysis of celebrity
practice on Twitter, which they argue takes place through “the appearance
and performance of ‘backstage’ access.”37 They conceptualize celebrity as
“an organic and ever-changing performative practice” which involves
“ongoing maintenance of a fan base, performed intimacy, authenticity and
access, and construction of a consumable persona.”38 “Micro-celebrities,”
individuals who have built up a devoted audience on digital platforms, are
pioneers and masters of this practice, but other kinds of celebrities have
come to adopt the same methods to maintain their fanbases with the rise
of social media.
The performed intimacy is especially important for my discussion here,
and Marwick and boyd argue that celebrities reveal seemingly personal
information on Twitter to establish “a sense of intimacy between partici-
pant and follower.”39 Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi argue similarly that
an “‘ideology of intimacy’ has formed the conditions in which the celeb-
rity, along with other public gures and the ordinary person, now labour
as emotional subjects in the public arena.”40
Since Marwick and boyd’s 2011 article and Nunn and Biressi’s 2010
piece, this way of practicing celebrity has only become more established
and takes place not only on Twitter but also on Instagram and other social
media platforms. Barker, Gill, and Harvey also argue that “we live in a
world suffused and saturated with representations of intimate relation-
ships.”41 Even though their examination of mediated intimacy primarily
concerns romantic relationships and sex, the point about the domineering
presence of intimate relationships carries over to issues like mental health,
in that it explains the naturalness with which details of previously “per-
sonal” and “private” topics are now discussed out in the open.
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deFining CelebriTy
Another important aspect to keep in mind when discussing celebrity is its
role as an economic condition that produces value and prot, and that
involves a range of practices beyond the celebrity’s professional employ-
ment (i.e. as musician or actor for example). During the rst part of the
twentieth century, the primary value of the Hollywood celebrity was to
differentiate lm products and generate attention for a lm, but as the
studio system collapsed and the entertainment business grew, a whole
industry emerged that “found ways to generate value from the celebrity’s
whole life on and off the screen, creating lifestyle synergies between stars,
products, services and events.”42
The monetary value of the celebrity has always been dependent on the
audience that it can deliver. Alison Hearn and Stephanie Schoenhoff
examine how celebrity has changed as the measurements of audiences
have become more and more specied. Various tools have been used to
measure audience engagement, from the Nielsen ratings of television
viewership, the Q score that measures familiarity and likeability, and the
Klout score which claimed to measure and score the totality of a person’s
social media impact. Originally, the value a celebrity was able to generate
came from box ofce and record sales. Eventually it moved into a larger
eld of endorsed products and direct marketing of their own commodi-
ties. For example, instead of endorsing or appearing in an ad for a per-
fume, celebrities began producing their own perfumes (or other wares) for
direct sale to audiences, something that became common in the 1990s
when celebrities “began to congure themselves explicitly as brands.”43
Within celebrity branding, the process of value generation is strengthened
“because it relies so completely on the ongoing and innitely malleable
distinctiveness of the celebrity’s ‘personal’ lifestyle.”44 Here authenticity
becomes one of the most important elements determining the value of a
celebrity, “beyond the roles played or music created, today’s celebrity
brand is predicated on convincing consumers of the authenticity of their
inherent ‘being’ beyond the limelight.”45 This emphasis on authenticity is
only heightened when it comes to micro-celebrities and inuencers, for
whom the “promise of authenticity” is a central aspect of their strong rela-
tion to their followers, the strength of which is what determines how
much monetary value is invested in them by marketers and advertising
agencies.46 In other words, the increased intimacy between celebrities and
fans is closely tied to a longer history of monetizing the celebrity’s whole
life by presenting a “real” image.
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111
The “relatability” of Cosmopolitan’s mental health coverage, which
manages to touch on difcult subjects but does so in a non-threatening
and distanced way, ts well into this marketable authenticity. One can
presume that a celebrity would want to appear real to convey authenticity
and intimacy, but they would not want to do so in a way that presents too
much difculty or pain, because doing so might risk the audience/fan
becoming uncomfortable and no longer acting as a consumer of whatever
product is being sold in conjunction with the celebrity brand. The audi-
ence/fan still has to act as a consumer and generate monetary value, but
they might be deterred from doing so if they get too sad or down from
hearing about a celebrity’s personal struggle. By presenting difculties in
distanced and relatable ways a celebrity can appear authentic without
becoming “too much.”47
Additionally, whether or not a social relationship is perceived as authen-
tic or real is often determined based on the strength of the “commitment
to the ‘inner psychological concerns of each person.’”48 The media dis-
course in which celebrities share their own experiences of depression and
anxiety is thus one where fans are expecting greater personal connection
to their idols. This creates a context for celebrity practice where disclosing
private details is not out of the ordinary, but instead part of the norm. For
celebrities, telling the world that you have suffered through depression
might no longer be something that taints your image, but in fact improves
it by contributing to the authenticity of your performance of self. As such,
disclosing details about one’s mental health might even be a strategical
choice in order to maintain a close relationship with fans. When looking at
the relationship between celebrity and fan in purely economic terms, the
incorporation of vulnerability into the public narrative of the star becomes
a protable choice.
The tendency to share issues of mental health is also seen in the world
of micro-celebrities, where several of the biggest stars in the world of
beauty and lifestyle YouTubers have spoken openly and repeatedly about
their struggles with anxiety.49 Despite the still dominant perception of
social media as “an archive of endlessly positive self-documentation,”
among micro-celebrities on sites like YouTube the display of negative
affect is increasingly common.50 Rachel Berryman and Misha Kavka pres-
ent several examples of crying and anxiety vlogs made by YouTubers with
large followings and argue that the displays of negative affects here become
productive, in that they “cement authenticity, offer (self-)therapy and
strengthen ties of intimacy between YouTubers and their followers.”51 An
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112
unltered and “raw” video of someone crying becomes in this context a
sign of realness and vulnerability that reinforces the bonds between micro-
celebrity and fan. In relation to the more traditional celebrities I discuss in
this chapter, the continued success of micro-celebrities on platforms like
YouTube inuences the way that more traditional celebrities come to con-
struct their own celebrity image. This includes a heightened (in compari-
son to previous eras) intimacy between celebrity and fans, that expresses
itself in things like more openness about mental health struggles.
Lastly, this shift to more and more intimate channels of communication
between celebrity and fans is also part of a turn toward ordinariness in
celebrity culture. Joshua Gamson notes that the celebrity narrative that
positions the famous as ordinary and “just like us” has long been used to
make celebrities more relatable and invite identication with them.52 The
elevation of the ordinary has intensied from the 1990s and onwards, rst
with the rise of reality TV and its practice of making stars out of ordinary
people, and then with the Internet and the possibility to become famous
without the traditional celebrity industry.53 This has only intensied with
the rise of self-branding and the emergence of the social media inuencer.54
spoTlighT onpop sTars
Both Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez have been prominent mental health
advocates that have appeared frequently in my celebrity archive. I chose to
focus on the two of them in this chapter because they have spoken about
their issues repeatedly in very visible ways. Both of them were also child
stars who made their debut on the children’s show Barney and Friends
(1992-2009). After getting to know each other on the television series,
Lovato and Gomez developed a close friendship that became highly pub-
licized——shown on magazine covers, in a series of homemade YouTube
videos by the two stars, the made-for-TV-movie Princess Protection
Program, and several unauthorized biographies about the “BFFs” (best
friends forever).55
As girls and teen celebrities, Lovato and Gomez were at the center of
US media culture’s fascination with girls in the early 2000s. As Anita
Harris argues, the girls seen in popular media tend to be either “can-do”
girls who are condent and have almost innite capacity for success, or
“at-risk” girls who lack self-esteem and engage in risky behavior.56 Both of
these gures circulate together in media culture as examples to follow——
where the at-risk girl functions as a warning to the can-do girl, reminding
F. THELANDERSSON

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her “that failure is an ever-lurking possibility that must be staved off
through sustained application.”57 These two tropes come together in the
above mentioned gure of the female trainwreck, a phenomenon Sarah
Projansky in her work on girls in media culture calls the “‘crash-and-burn’
girl.”58 This is the girl who “has it all, but who—through weakness and/
or the inability to live with the pressure of celebrity during the process of
growing up—makes a mistake and therefore faces a spectacular descent
into at-risk status.”59 In her study of spectacular girls, Projansky puts
Lovato in the fold of the “crash-and-burn” girl who had potential but fell
into at-risk-status when she was involved in a scandal and subsequently
went to rehab (more on that below). Gomez, on the other hand, is dened
as a “super can-do girl” who is glamorous but playful and “the kind of girl
anyone would want to be around.”60
What becomes interesting for this book and the larger discussion of
mediated representations of mental illness is that Lovato since their 2010
breakdown and revelation of a bipolar diagnosis, eating disorder and sub-
stance abuse has made several comebacks and has managed to successfully
incorporate their mental distresses into the Demi Lovato brand in a way
that recasts them as a “can-do girl” again. And Gomez has since 2016
been open about her struggles with depression and anxiety, effectively
folding those into her image, including in the marketing of her own line
of makeup which professes to promote mental wellbeing and has made
mental health awareness a cornerstone of its brand.61 Both Lovato and
Gomez have successfully incorporated their mental struggles into their
celebrity brands in ways that disrupt the “can-do—at-risk”—binary.
Lovato is an example of someone who rst spoke out about their issues
earlier in the decade, at a time when it was not as common for (especially
female*) celebrities to be outspoken about mental illnesses. Their tell-all
documentaries, many statements, and engagements with mental health
advocacy have provided a rich archive from which to study how attitudes
about mental health have taken shape during the 2010s. Gomez, who has
only been open about her struggles since 2016, is instead an example of
the mid-2010s openness around mental health issues, and her statements
around them reveal the state of the more recent and mental-illness-aware
media culture.
In addition to both having been very visible around issues of mental
health, their positions in girl culture as crash-and-burn and can-do girls*
respectively make their stories illustrative of how a postfeminist media cul-
ture that urges girls and women to be condent and empowered grapples
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114
with issues of mental illness.62 In the discussion that follows I intend to
show how Lovato and Gomez’s celebrity health narratives, and the numer-
ous confessions from female stars about their own mental health issues
from 2015 and onwards, seem to suggest that the ideal postfeminist and
neoliberal subject who works on herself constantly to achieve success has
some room for failure as long as it is successfully overcome. In this sense
the narratives I discuss here are of the same type that Shani Orgad and
Rosalind Gill discuss in relation to the condence cult of contemporary
women’s media, where failure is accepted “under the condition that it has
been overcome.”63 A certain kind of anti-self-help book, where failure is
celebrated, has become popular. But Orgad and Gill show how failure is
only allowed when it has already been defeated, when it “can be referred
to as something that happened and is safely sealed in the past.”64 The rep-
resentation of emotional distress that we see here is thus one that involves
a certain kind of distance to the problems at hand, rather than a depiction
of the breakdown as it happens. In this sense these narratives also t into
what Angela McRobbie denes as a common trope of late-capitalist media
culture: the perfect-imperfect-resilience.65 For McRobbie, the perfect
encourages women “to succeed meritocratically, while simultaneously
introducing heightened competition, constantly redifferentiating and
establishing division.”66 The imperfect then allows for some expressions of
failure and critique of the impossibility of constant success, but it is quickly
followed by resilience, which functions as a “bounce-back” mechanism
that reinvigorates the aim for the perfect. My argument follows Orgad and
Gill and McRobbie, and I contend that Lovato and Gomez present their
struggles in a way that exemplies protable vulnerability——that is, their
ailments add authenticity and relatability to their celebrity brands in prof-
itable ways.
demi lovaTo: Troubled sTar andexperT
oFre-invenTion
Demi Lovato started their career in 2002, at the age of 10, on the chil-
dren’s television show Barney and Friends and had their breakthrough in
the Disney Channel musical television lm Camp Rock (2008) and its
sequel Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam (2010). In addition to their television
work, Lovato has released seven studio albums: Don’t Forget (2008), Here
We Go Again (2009), Unbroken (2011), Demi (2013), Condent (2015),
F. THELANDERSSON

115
Tell Me You Love Me (2017) and Dancing with the Devil... the Art of
Starting Over (2021). In early 2022, the singer’s net worth was reportedly
about $40 million.67 In other words, their artistry is a big business involv-
ing a lot of money and employing a big team.
Lovato rose to fame at the age of 16 after starring in the Disney pro-
duction Camp Rock, leading them to go on tour with the, at the time very
popular, boy band the Jonas Brothers, who were also associated with the
lm and its sequel. In October 2010, after a performance in Columbia,
Lovato punched one of their backup dancers and abruptly left the tour to
go straight to rehab in Illinois. At the time it was reported that they were
seeking treatment for “emotional and physical issues.”68 In April the fol-
lowing year, three months after leaving the treatment center, Lovato
revealed in an interview with People magazine that, after seeking care for
an eating disorder and self-harm, they had also received a bipolar disorder
diagnosis.69 In the trajectory of a celebrity breakdown, the tabloid press
often sets the stage for how the audience will respond to the scandal, but
the stars themselves have the power to talk back and confess or deny
rumors.70 Franssen notes that Lovato went far beyond merely salvaging
their reputation, instead they embraced their “mental struggle and diag-
nosis with bipolar disorder and incorporated them into [their] celebrity
narrative.”71 Barely a year after revealing their diagnosis, in March 2012,
the documentary Demi Lovato: Stay Strong was released on MTV.72 Here
Lovato’s fans got to follow the star as they prepared for and subsequently
went on the Unbroken tour, to promote their newly released album. The
documentary features several long interviews with Lovato and presents
them as a star that has hit rock bottom but has come out stronger on the
other side. The image used to promote it, which also frames its commer-
cial breaks, shows the inside of Lovato’s wrists, one of which has “stay”
and the other “strong” tattooed on them. The lm focuses mostly on the
singer’s eating disorder and self-harm behavior, and also mentions the
bipolar diagnosis they received while in treatment.
Franssen’s analysis of Lovato’s celebrity health narrative focuses primar-
ily on this 2012 documentary. He compellingly identies three levels on
which Lovato’s recovery is narrativized in the lm: “it entails a narrative of
private struggle, which authenticates her crisis; a narrative of diagnosis,
which reies and externalizes the cause of her breakdown; and a narrative
of self-improvement and self-transformation, which recalibrates her celeb-
rity image.”73 I will return to these levels in my analysis of Lovato’s second
tell-all documentary, Simply Complicated.
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Stay Strong also features several interviews with Lovato’s fans before
and after concerts. They talk about how they are inspired by the singer’s
honesty about their struggles and express a sentiment of “If Demi can do
it so can I.” One fan says “When Demi came out about her issues and
about the cutting and the eating disorders I was just really inspired and
that’s why I told my parents about it and that’s why I went to treatment,”
exemplifying the power of a celebrity telling their story. In this framing
Lovato’s mental distress and the willingness to speak openly about it
becomes a “positive” aspect of their story, in that it is doing “good work”
by inspiring others to get better. This is reected in a scene where Lovato
is seen leading their team in prayer before the start of a show. Here they
not only express the hope that “we do our best performance possible,”
but also request God to “take whatever pain is inside these audience mem-
bers [and] let them have fun tonight.” In another scene Lovato is shown
performing as their voiceover says “I wasn’t given this voice just to sing”
but that “there is a bigger picture and that is to use your voice, inspire
people and to get people through their day and problems and to pick
people up when they are down.” Lovato’s honesty about their struggles
becomes a lifeline to their fans, who through Lovato can acknowledge
their own problems.
A few others speak about how inspired they are by Lovato’s show of
strength and condence, echoing the condence cult(ure) described by
Gill and Orgad and foreshadowing Lovato’s 2015 album titled simply
Condent.74 The documentary being titled Stay Strong, the name of the
tour featured in the lm being Unbroken, and the subsequent album being
titled Condent, all reinforce the focus of much popular media culture at
the time to encourage women to be strong, empowered, and in charge.
And the narrative of Lovato having had a break-down and then recovered
ts well into the logic of condence culture, where the presence of an
already overcome vulnerability serves to make the condent subject more
relatable.75 And as Lovato’s career goes on, they mobilize this already-
dealt- with vulnerability over and over again, in distinctively protable ways.
From Crash-and-Burn toCan-Do
In her analysis of three British female celebrities who had been labeled
“bad girls” during the 1990s and early 2000s, Emma Bell argues that they
used disclosures of mental illness to remove the “bad” label.76 According
to her, “after a period of media antagonism (and subsequent cultural and
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market devaluation), ‘bad girl’ celebrities can re-gain public attention and
cultural value through revelations of mental illness.”77 The stars that Bell
looks at (“Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, “ladette” Gail Porter, and “wild child”
Kerry Katona) gained their original fame in the 1990s as part of the “Girl
Power” and “ladette” wave in British popular culture at the time.78 Their
disclosures of mental illness happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s
(and were thus not within the scope of my archive here) through autobio-
graphical reality and life products such as memoirs and reality television
shows, and were framed as repudiations of the pop-feminism associated
with their original claims to fame. Bell describes how the confessions did
give these women renewed attention and another shot at stardom, but
they were often accompanied by derisions from both tabloid press and
serious media. She concludes that “the cultural interest in these women
depends on their being simultaneously in and out of control with regard
to the circulation and contours of their public images,” where their
attempts at regaining control of their public images through mental illness
revelations were derided and ridiculed in the media.79 This makes the
celebrities Bell studies different from the cases I have examined, where the
stars have largely managed to maintain control over their health narratives.
The discrepancies can be attributed both to the variation of national con-
text (I focus on a US context and the British tabloids tend to be more
ruthless in their celebrity coverage than American ones) and a shift in the
mid-2010s toward more acceptance toward mental health awareness.
Nevertheless, what Lovato does in the 2012 documentary Stay Strong
could be read through the lens that Bell describes. The move to put out
their own account of the “breakdown” and rehab-stay can be seen as a way
to take control over the public narrative about their personal life so as not
to be labeled a “bad girl.” By coming out and talking about their strug-
gles, Lovato sidesteps outsider speculations about what may have caused
their distress. This documentary also functions as a useful tool for Lovato
to step away from the wholesome branding of the Disney channel that was
their original claim to fame, and frame the launch of the album Unbroken
(2011) with which they are shown touring in the lm. This album has a
more mature, grown-up, RnB-vibe compared to the singer’s previous two
albums which were in a more pop-rock vein (something Lovato discusses
in the accompanying audio commentary to Unbroken). The revelation of
mental illness struggles serves to cement Lovato’s authenticity as a “real”
person behind the wholesomeness of the Disney brand. The title of the
album, Unbroken, quite literally reects the “can-do girl” trope of
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condence, resilience, and independence.80 It is almost as if Lovato’s team
produced the Stay Strong documentary to clean up their image and re-do
it as a “can-do woman” whose experiences only add to their appeal of
strength and condence. Something that Franssen picks up on in his anal-
ysis of the documentary, which he describes as “a representation as well as
a performance of a process of self-management, producing an updated,
better ‘self’ for Lovato.”81 This leads to the successful incorporation of
their “crash-and-burn” status into a “can-do” narrative, something that
the star will do multiple times again with a second documentary, subse-
quent relapse, and a third documentary.
In the years following the release of Stay Strong Lovato kept working
and releasing albums at the same time as they established themselves as a
mental health advocate. This included things like establishing a scholarship
program in the name of their late father to help people pay for treatment at
the CAST Recovery center where Lovato had gotten support, and releasing
a book of afrmations (Staying Strong: 365 Days a Year, 2013) that reached
the number one spot in the “Advice, How-to & Miscellaneous”-category
of the NewYork Times bestseller list and was then followed by a compan-
ion book (Staying Strong: A Journal, 2014).82 These two books and their
success reveal how Lovato and their team managed to fold their painful
experiences into the Lovato-brand, further authenticate their struggles, and
quite literally prot off of them in book sales. In 2014 Lovato also embarked
on the “Mental Health Listening and Engagement Tour,” sponsored by a
pharmaceutical company and a few mental health organizations.83 In 2016
they announced that they would host seminars with fans to discuss mental
health issues as part of their tour; then appeared at the Democratic National
Convention to give a speech about mental health in conjunction with
endorsing Hillary Clinton; and in September they revealed in an interview
with CBS that they co-owns part of the rehab center where they received
treatment.84 These are only a few of the many actions taken by Lovato dur-
ing these years to establish their brand as a mental health advocate. The ease
with which this aspect is folded into their celebrity brand shows the prot-
ability of mobilizing vulnerability in this way.
Simply Complicated
In October 2017 Lovato released their second “tell-all” documentary,
Demi Lovato: Simply Complicated, to coincide with the release of the
album Tell Me You Love Me, this time on YouTube.85 The fact that Lovato
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chose to release their second autobiographical documentary on this plat-
form rather than a traditional distributor shows the leverage of YouTube
as a media actor but also the inuence of the microcelebrity vloggers who
have made the platform what it is today. Stay Strong was released on MTV
in 2012 and is not freely available anywhere online. Simply Complicated,
on the other hand, is still available worldwide on YouTube, making this
version of Lovato’s celebrity health narrative as accessible to fans as the
videos of native YouTube stars.
This documentary starts with Lovato stating: “I actually had anxiety
around this interview …. because the last time I did an interview this long
I was on cocaine,” referring to the 2012 Stay Strong documentary. This
sets the stage for this newer lm to be “rawer” and more “real” than the
previous one, which is supported by Lovato’s repeated confessions of
manipulating those around them and saying “I wasn’t working my pro-
gram. I wasn’t ready to get sober. I was sneaking it on planes, sneaking it
in bathrooms, sneaking it throughout the night.”
Lovato and their team re-tell the story of the initial breakdown that
happened on tour with the Jonas Brothers in more detail than in the ear-
lier documentary and with input from the Jonas Brothers themselves.
Their manager, Phil McIntyre, is also featured speaking extensively about
the darkness beneath the surface of Lovato’s life during 2012 and 2013,
while they were telling the world that they were sober and healed. The life
coach Mike Bayer (author of several self-help books and an expert con-
tributor to the Dr Phil television show), who is one of the founders of the
CAST-treatment centers and who was hired by McIntyre to help Lovato
get out of addiction, is also interviewed in this documentary. McIntyre,
Bayer, and Lovato speak at length about how difcult Lovato was to work
with during their darkest days, and they all describe the moment when it
came to a breaking point. McIntyre, the manager, recounts how he had
gotten Lovato’s entire team onboard to stage a kind of intervention,
where they told the singer that if they did not commit to getting better,
he and the entire team would leave. Lovato responded by crying and ask-
ing what they could do, and Bayer tells them to hand over their cellphone.
In a montage of McIntyre and Bayer recounting the event, they describe
how Lovato smashed their phone and then put it in a glass of water to
nalize its destruction. As he is holding Lovato’s old phone, McIntyre says
“this was the gateway to everything, this was the wrong people, it was
drug dealers, it was a lot of the negative inuences in her life were coming
through the cellphone.” And as if to emphasize that this was not Lovato
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being forced to give up their autonomy, the singer comments next that “I
think that approached worked for me because, it sounds silly but it was the
beginning of the process of surrendering. At the end of the day it was my
decision.” Next, Bayer and McIntyre describe the bizarre circumstances of
Lovato’s life at the time, when the star was serving as a judge on the reality
television program X-factor. Bayer says “Meanwhile she’s a judge on
X-factor. She’s 19 years old and she’s in her rst year of sobriety.” McIntyre
continues: “What nobody knows is that while she was a judge she’s living
in a sober apartment, with roommates, she’s having to do chores, she has
no cellphone. She is completely and totally submitted to the process of
recovery.” Next Lovato says: “You really have to lean into the people who
are trying to support you. Like my family, like Mike [Bayer] and Phil
[McIntyre]. You know you really have to surrender because that’s when
the change is gonna happen.” Notably, none of them says anything about
why Lovato had to work as a judge on X-factor while going through
recovery, or why they had to keep churning out albums when they were
suffering.
This particular storytelling montage is thrilling for someone interested
in Lovato’s personal life, by telling viewers what it was “actually” like dur-
ing those years they are invited into the symbolical backstage of their life.
In giving fans access to this previously closed-off part of Lovato’s life, the
documentary engages in the “performative practice” of an effective celeb-
rity narrative.86
In many ways Simply Complicated is a complex and multifaceted por-
trayal of living with bipolar disorder, addiction, and an eating disorder.
Lovato reveals to their manager on camera that they had a relapse with
their eating disorder related to the recent breakup with their boyfriend of
many years. This together with the conversations about how hard it was
for them to get sober, paints a picture of recovery and living with mental
illness as an ongoing work in progress, something one has to keep working
at for the rest of one’s life. This follows the logic of much mental health
and addiction advocacy, but it also ts very well into the project of neolib-
eral and postfeminist subjectivity, where the subject has to continually
work on herself to constantly better herself.87 And for all of Lovato’s and
their team’s honesty about their struggles, what is left glaringly untouched
is why they had to keep working while they were in such a vulnerable
place. Following the logic of postfeminism and neoliberalism, the docu-
mentary seems to suggest that it is ok to struggle with things like addic-
tion, eating disorders and mental illness, as long as you keep working
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against these difculties and keep producing new things and adding to the
labor market. The logic at work in Lovato’s treatment program also
reects Scharff and Gill’s observations about the “psychic life” of neolib-
eralism and postfeminism, where you have to work at bettering not only
your career or physical body but also your affects.88
The same levels of narrativization found in the previous documentary,
Stay Strong, are present in Simply Complicated. There is “a narrative of
private struggle, which authenticates her crisis.”89 Interestingly, most of
the private struggles presented in the later lm invalidate the authenticity
and “realness” of what was presented in the earlier one. This is most starkly
exemplied in Lovato’s opening statement in the second lm about using
cocaine while lming the rst one. But this is not presented as something
that invalidates the truth and authenticity conveyed by Lovato, rather it
serves to reinforce their realness in portraying them as extraordinarily bold
in their current honesty.
Also folded into the narrative of the singer’s private struggle in the
second lm is the pressure under which they were under while working for
Disney, touring, and recording an album all at the same time. The fact that
Lovato was bullied in school is also mentioned as the cause of their trou-
bles, as is the dysfunctional relationship with their biological father, who is
described as an “addict and alcoholic.” But it is the revelation of the bipo-
lar diagnosis that ties it all together, working here as it did in the rst
documentary to reify and externalize the cause of her issues.90 At about 20
minutes into the lm, just after having recounted the violent incident
while on tour in Columbia, another member of Lovato’s team, John
Taylor, says “that was when it dawned on me that this was probably a
much bigger situation than just a kid who wanted to party.” The “much
bigger situation” is implied to be the bipolar diagnosis, which Lovato’s
manager recounts them getting in the following scene. Next, the singer
explains it as follows:
When I got diagnosed with bipolar disorder, it just made sense. When I was
younger I didn’t know why I would stay up so late writing and playing
music. And then I learned about episodes of mania and I realized that that’s
probably what it was—I was manic. In a way I knew that it wasn’t my fault
anymore. Something was actually off with me.
Here a connection is made between the bipolar diagnosis and Lovato’s
creativity, which reects the reverence in American culture for mania that
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Emily Martin identied in her comprehensive study of bipolar disorder in
the US.91 This is echoed in Franssen’s (2020) analysis of Lovato’s celebrity
health narrative, in which he identies the bipolar diagnosis specically as
tting “within a broader, distinctly gendered ‘spectacularization’ of female
breakdown and ongoing self-improvement.”92
Lovato’s description of the diagnosis as relieving them of fault echoes
Eva Illouz’s analysis of therapeutic narratives, which she argues makes the
individual responsible for her psychic wellbeing, but does so by “removing
any notion of moral fault.”93 Illouz contends that this kind of narrative
“enables one to mobilize the cultural schemes and values of moral indi-
vidualism, of change and self-improvement,” but by “transposing these to
childhood and to decient families, one is exonerated from the weight of
being at fault for living an unsatisfactory life.”94 We see that in the case of
Lovato with their alcoholic father and the bullying from classmates, but
also with the bipolar diagnosis. This suggests that in therapeutic narratives
of the late 2010s, a mental illness diagnosis weighs just as much, if not
more, than the dysfunctional family dynamics of the Freudian-dominated
narratives of the twentieth century. By adding a medical diagnosis to the
mix, Lovato is one step further removed from being at fault for their trou-
bles than if it was “just” their dysfunctional father and bullying. But nev-
ertheless, Lovato’s condition is still something that needs to be continually
managed, which is shown in the “recovery montage” toward the end of
the lm. It is also in this montage that the narrative of self-improvement
and self-transformation that “recalibrates her celebrity image” is found.95
This part of Simply Complicated is similar to the earlier documentary, but
in this version it is amped up, with physical exercise taking center stage as
a particular savior.
As the camera pans over a Los Angeles road lined with palm trees,
Lovato’s voice says “Everybody has their own path and recovery. For me
it’s about going to therapy, working my program, and having an honest
relationship with myself and the other people around me.” As the singer is
shown working out, sparring with professional boxers and then practicing
Jiu-Jitsu, their voice-over says “The gym really helps, and I know I would
be in a very dark place without it.” Then we see a montage of very well-lit
shots of Lovato exercising to upbeat music as they say “I’m on a journey
to discover what it’s like to be free of all demons.” During the gym
sequence, Lovato’s life coach Bayer explains how he introduced the star to
Jiu-Jitsu specically because it involves a “reward system that takes many
many many years to get through,” with the implied effect that they will be
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busy advancing within this kind of exercise for a long time to come.
Exercise is a remedy commonly prescribed as part of mental illness treat-
ment and it is not surprising that it is part of the singer’s recovery plan.
But it is remarkable how well this depiction of the role of exercise in
Lovato’s life ts with the neoliberal and postfeminist subject who never
stops working on herself. Here the script about the benets of working
out is slightly new in that it is not (only) about getting a desirable body,
but about keeping a distressed mind in check.
The last part of the documentary also expresses both a postfeminist and
a popular feminist ethos, showing Lovato and their friends discussing dat-
ing. At one point the singer says “I’m on a dating app with both guys and
girls. I am open to human connection whether that’s through a male or a
female that doesn’t matter to me.” Next Lovato’s stylist helps them pick
out a date outt, which turns into a montage of the singer in sexy poses as
they say “When I’m comfortable in my own skin I feel condent and when
I feel condent I feel sexy and when I feel sexy, watch out.” Then we see
Lovato’s friends talk about how fun “single Demi” is, to which the star
responds “There’s like a certain stigma around a woman having casual sex
and for me I just feel like it’s my body and it’s my choice and it’s exciting
and it’s a connection with somebody and it’s fun.” This sequence aligns
Lovato with the popular feminism that Sarah Banet-Weiser identies as a
prevalent feature of contemporary media culture. The star is here posi-
tioned both as a desirable sexual subject who is up for anything (a post-
feminist trope) and by pointing out the double standard for women having
casual sex, they also politicize their actions (albeit in the most gentle ways)
and aligns them with “feminist expressions and politics [that] are brand-
able [and] commensurate with market logics.”96 This is a kind of feminism
“that focus[es] on the individual body … [and] that emphasize[s] indi-
vidual attributes such as condence, self-esteem, and competence as par-
ticularly useful to neoliberal self-reliance and capitalist success.”97 The
affective position expressed by Lovato here also echoes (again) the con-
dence cult described by Orgad and Gill, where individual achievement and
self-esteem can solve structural issues.98
The notion of recovery as an ongoing process is different from the
victim-to-victor narratives that Lisa Blackman describes, in which the jour-
ney to recovery starts by acknowledging the illness, followed by the adop-
tion of a psychiatric treatment plan that ultimately cures the person
aficted so that they overcome the trouble once and for all.99 What we see
in the case of Lovato is instead a dedication to always be working at
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getting and staying better. This is a common aspect of addiction recovery,
where the subject, masculine or feminine, is told that their condition will
never end but can be eternally managed. What Lovato’s case shows is how
well this recovery narrative ts into the notion of the ideal neoliberal and
postfeminist subject who constantly works on herself to improve herself at
every turn. This is partly because the singer is recovering from not only
substance abuse issues, but also an eating disorder and bipolar disorder,
which opens up their health narrative for more than just “addicts” to iden-
tify with. Lovato’s story celebrates and conrms a neoliberal ideology of
meritocracy, where overcoming repeated crises and setbacks while remain-
ing productive “even under the pressures of the media, the market and
mental illness” positions them as “a shining example of the neoliberal,
self-managing subject.”100 That Lovato as a female* celebrity is able to
inhabit this position, where traditionally it has mostly been famous men
who have been able to reinvent themselves after scandal (as discussed
above), becomes less exceptional when one takes into account the feminist
media studies work on women as ideal neoliberal subjects.101 What
Lovato’s celebrity health narrative and the numerous confessions from
female stars about their own mental health issues from 2015 and onwards
seem to suggest, is that the ideal postfeminist and neoliberal subject who
works on herself constantly to achieve success has some room for failure as
long as it is successfully overcome. This, again, ts well into Orgad and
Gill’s analysis of a condence culture in which vulnerability is allowed
when it appears as something that is in the past.102 By combining the pro-
cess of addiction recovery with mental illness recovery, Lovato’s narrative
indirectly challenges the victim-to-victor narrative and recongures the
idea of being completely cured of mental illness into one of more contin-
ual maintenance. This is on the one hand truer to how managing mental
illness works for most people, but it also reveals that the presence of trau-
matic events is not a taint on a celebrity’s image but rather an opportunity
to strengthen the protability of the celebrity brand through shared
vulnerability.
The Public Acknowledgment ofaRelapse
That the process of recovery is never complete was seen for Lovato the
year after Simply Complicated was released. On June 21, 2018, the singer
released a single titled “Sober,” which was introduced on Twitter as sim-
ply “My truth.”103 The lyrics seemed to suggest a relapse into substance
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abuse, with the chorus going “Mama, I’m so sorry I’m not sober any-
more/ And daddy please forgive me for the drinks spilled on the oor/ To
the ones who never left me, we’ve been down this road before/ I’m so
sorry/ I’m not sober anymore.”104 A few days later it was reported that
Lovato was in a feud with life coach Bayer and that every photo and men-
tion of their name had been wiped from the website of the CAST-center
that he runs and which Lovato had previously been a co-owner of.105 And
on July 24, a little over a month after the release of “Sober,” Lovato was
rushed to the hospital after an overdose that almost killed them.106 About
two weeks after the incident Lovato posted a note to their fans on
Instagram, in which they said “I have always been transparent about my
journey with addiction. What I’ve learned is that this illness is not some-
thing that disappears or fades with time. It is something I must continue
to overcome and have not done yet.”107 Here again is the notion of addic-
tion and mental illness as something that needs to be constantly worked at.
The release of “Sober” can on the one hand be read as an honest way
of portraying the struggle of addiction and the very common experience
of relapsing. But on the other hand, it can be seen as a way of incorporat-
ing Lovato’s struggles into their brand and literally proting off of them
(Sober was certied Gold by The Recording Industry Association of
America in August 2019).108 Or a less cynical reading of the situation
might be that the release of the single and the confession of their relapse
was not, as might have been the case in other eras and with other artists, a
taint on their brand but instead t neatly into the larger “Lovato product”
and almost functioned as conrmation of their authenticity.
Another thing to note in relation to Lovato’s relapse is the outpouring
of support from fans. A day after the report about the overdose, a fan
account on Twitter started the hashtag #HowDemiHasHelpedMe, urging
other fans to “share your stories and positive things so hopefully Demi
sees positive things if she comes online.”109 The hashtag was trending on
Twitter as fans began posting their stories and it was covered by several
media outlets.110 One notable example of a fan contribution was the
following:
The night I attempted suicide Demi had a performance on tv. My dad was
watching it and not me. I was upstairs in my room taking pills to overdose.
I heard [Lovato’s song] skyscraper from my room so I told my mom I took
pills and checked into a hospital for 8 Days.111
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Other fans have responded to this tweet with things like “You are so
strong! I hope you are better now,” “So glad that you are still here,” and
“I’m sending you a long tight hug. Thank you for sharing your story.”112
Like this the fans show support not just for Lovato, but also for each other.
The reciprocal acts by the fans in sharing how Lovato has helped them
might be a way to help each other through the public display of vulnerability
on social media, something I discuss more in the following chapter. Because
even if they purport to write to Lovato, the immediate audience is not the
singer themselves (the assumption on social media is that stars usually do
not read everything that is said about them, exemplied in what an occasion
it is for fans when they do get a response from their idol), but other fans. In
this way the outpouring of support for the celebrity becomes in itself a
forum for sharing experiences and making each other feel less alone.
Another example of the outpouring of support from Lovato’s fans at the
time was a group of fans gathering in Atlantic City on the night when the
singer was supposed to perform but had canceled due to the overdose. A
group of over 60 “Lovatics” (what their fans call themselves) gathered to
sing their songs together to show their support for the singer. One fan
wrote on Twitter about the gathering: “Omg the people in Atlantic City
for the Demi tribute are in a circle talking about how Demi has helped
them and some of them even started crying :( the bond we have over Demi
is so special.”113 Here Lovato’s openness about their issues becomes a way
for fans to share their own experiences with each other and get support.
Since the 2018 relapse Lovato has made a large-scale comeback, rst at
the 2020 Grammys with a performance that was widely praised for its
display of vulnerability.114 In the spring of 2021 they released their third
tell-all documentary (this time in the form of a four-part YouTube series)
in conjunction with the release of a new album, both of which were titled
Dancing with the Devil.115 In the docuseries Lovato and their team bare it
all, revealing that the singer had been using heroin and crack cocaine, and
that the overdose involved “aftermarket pills” laced with the extremely
strong opioid Fentanyl that nearly killed them.116 At the same time they
released a music video that featured Lovato in a ctional reenactment of
the overdose and the hospital stay that followed it.117 In this way it is clear
that the cyclical nature of Lovato’s bipolar disorder and the always present
risk of relapse into substance abuse or eating disorder are not the dire
threats to their life and career as they might have been in previous eras.
Instead, Lovato’s struggles and their overcoming them serve to strengthen
their brand as “pop’s self-help princess.”118
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selena gomez: Can-do girl Turned menTal
healTh advoCaTe
Like Lovato, Selena Gomez had her acting debut on the children’s show
Barney & Friends, where she appeared during 2002–2004 from age 10 to
12. She then gained wider fame as the lead on the Disney channel show
Wizards of Waverly Place (2007–2012) and subsequently starred in a multi-
tude of lms, some aimed at the Disney audience and others being more
controversial, like Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012) and Woody
Allen’s A Rainy Day in NewYork (2019). Beyond her acting work she has
released three albums with her former band Selena Gomez and the Scene: Kiss
& Tell (2009), A Year Without Rain (2010), and When the Sun Goes Down
(2011), all of which attained gold certications and reached the top ten in
the US. She has also released three albums as a solo artist: Stars Dance
(2013), Revival (2015), and Rare (2020), all of which debuted at number
one in the US.119 Additionally, she has executive produced the Netix drama
show 13 Reasons Why (2017-2020) and the documentary series Living
Undocumented (2019). In early 2022, Gomez’s net worth is reportedly $75
million.120 Gomez’s brand is thus, like Lovato’s, a big enterprise involving a
lot of money and employing a large number of people.
As mentioned above, Gomez had an overall more wholesome persona
than Lovato, staying away from the kind of scandal that the latter singer
was involved in (even if Gomez was in an on-and-off relationship with fel-
low young artist Justin Bieber from 2010-2018 that led to a lot of specula-
tions from fans and the media, those rumors were primarily about the state
of their partnership).121 In 2013 Gomez canceled the end of a planned
tour to “spend some time” on herself, and in early 2014 she checked in to
an Arizona rehab facility. This led to tabloid speculation about drug or
alcohol abuse, but when she chose to speak about the events the following
year she revealed that she had been diagnosed with the autoimmune dis-
ease lupus and had been receiving chemotherapy for it at the time.122 It
was not until in August 2016, also in relation to the cancelation of a
planned tour, that she revealed that she was suffering from anxiety and
depression. In a statement to People magazine, she said that she had “dis-
covered that anxiety, panic attacks and depression can be side effects of
lupus, which can present their own challenges.” Adding, “I want to be
proactive and focus on maintaining my health and happiness and have
decided that the best way forward is to take some time off … I know I am
not alone by sharing this, I hope others will be encouraged to address their
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own issues.”123 Here again the logic is that if Gomez with her large audi-
ence speaks out, it will inspire others to seek help. Additionally, in the
People magazine story about the break a “source close to Gomez” tells the
outlet that it is “‘absolutely not related to alcohol or substance abuse’ and
was prompted after she ‘hadn’t felt like herself’ over the last couple of
months.”124 Here a clear demarcation is made against addiction issues,
which indirectly serves to separate the anxiety and depression that Gomez
was suffering from, from any assumption about the misuse of alcohol or
drugs. This can be read as Gomez’s team trying to deny rumors about her
abusing substances and make clear that she is not like one of the many
other starlets whose troubles are the result of too much partying (like in
the case of many of the “trainwrecks” mentioned earlier). Even if addic-
tion issues are increasingly considered to be a disease that is out of the
control of the person suffering them, there is still a level of irresponsibility
attached to the notion of someone getting addicted, as it presumes an
engagement with illicit drugs or excessive amounts of alcohol at some
point. By coming out as suffering from anxiety and depression as a result
of her lupus, Gomez’s issues are indirectly dened as rooted in a biomedi-
cal paradigm beyond her control.
A few months after initially announcing that she was taking a break to
focus on her mental health, Gomez appeared at the American Music
Awards (AMAs) in November 2016. In the acceptance speech for Best
Female Artist in the Pop/Rock genre, the singer addressed the break, say-
ing “I had everything and I was absolutely broken inside. And I kept it all
together enough to never let you down, but I kept too much together, to
where I let myself down.” She thanked her fans for their loyalty during this
time and added “if you are broken, you do not have to stay broken.”125
The speech at the AMAs was widely praised for its sincerity and honesty,
with many media outlets pointing out that Gomez held back the tears
while delivering it, as well as how other celebrities in attendance at the
awards show seemed to appreciate what she was saying.126
After initially opening up about her mental health issues, Gomez repeat-
edly spoke out for mental illness awareness, prompting Vogue to describe
her as “a compelling new voice for a generation of young women … [who
is] breaking down conversational barriers surrounding emotional health”
in March 2017. In this interview she mentions rehab, group therapy, and
dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) as elements that have helped her,
revealing that she sees her therapist ve times a week.127
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In a cover story for the September 2017 issue of InStyle magazine,
titled “Selena Gomez Is Grown Up, in Love, and Taking Control of Her
Mental Health,” the journalist describes Gomez as having “a particularly
potent power: Her celebrity comes not just from what she creates, how
she looks, and whom she dates but from how she has suffered and how she
has picked herself up.”128 In the interview accompanying the piece Gomez
talks about her 90-day stay in a treatment center the previous year, how
insecurity is something she works on in therapy, and how she is learning to
stand up for herself. Here, just like in Lovato’s health narrative, Gomez is
portrayed as having successfully overcome, or rather as successfully man-
aging, her mental health issues. The journalist’s description of this experi-
ence as giving her “a particularly potent power” marks Gomez’s suffering
as something that adds to her celebrity and star power. That she has been
to rehab is not a negative point on her resume; on the other hand, it seems
to be a valuable experience that gives Gomez a maturity and frankness that
only adds to the authenticity of her brand.
Just like with Lovato, Gomez’s struggles were recurring. Later in 2017,
it was revealed that she had a kidney transplant from a close friend and
subsequently “laid low” for a while, not promoting her work or posting
on social media. Then in January 2018 she checked into a “two-week
wellness” program to regroup as a preventative measure for her mental
health.129 A few months later, she said in an interview in Harper’s Bazaar
that her struggle with depression and anxiety is “not something I feel I’ll
ever overcome” adding that “it’s a battle I’m gonna have to face for the
rest of my life, and I’m okay with that because I know that I’m choosing
myself over anything else.”130 Here she reects the notion of mental illness
recovery as a constant struggle, as displayed also in Lovato’s health narra-
tive. Additionally, the phrase “choosing myself over anything else” ts well
into a hyper-individualized neoliberal and postfeminist culture that posi-
tions the self as something to work on and prioritize at all costs.
The state of Gomez’s mental health became a widely discussed topic
again in the fall of 2018, rst when she announced that she would be tak-
ing a social media break (at the time she was the most followed person on
Instagram) and a few months later when she was reportedly hospitalized
twice in two weeks with issues related to the kidney transplant.131 These
hospitalizations caused her to have an “emotional breakdown” which led
to her checking into a mental health facility to receive DBT.132 This break-
down was not portrayed, as it might have been in other eras, as a sign of
“failure, inherent instability or a lack of resilience,” but instead it was
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incorporated into her health narrative of struggle and maintenance of
mental health.133
She then broke her silence in January of 2019 with a post on Instagram
to reect on the previous year, one “of self-reection, challenges and
growth.”134 In September 2019 Gomez received an award for furthering
“the public’s understanding of psychiatric illness and mental health” from
the McLean Hospital, known for its psychiatric expertise and associated
with Harvard Medical School.135 In conjunction with accepting the award
the singer also revealed that she herself had received treatment there for
mental health issues, and in April 2020 she disclosed that while there she
had received a bipolar diagnosis.136137
This latter revelation happened not in an interview with a magazine or
even on her own social media channels, but on the Instagram live talk
show Bright Minded, hosted by fellow former child actor and musician
Miley Cyrus during the initial COVID-19 lockdown.138 The news was
widely reported in multiple media outlets.139 When asked why she had
decided to tell the world about her diagnosis in this format instead of in a
traditional interview, Gomez said that she “liked the rawness of the show”
and felt comfortable to share her diagnosis with Cyrus because of the
casual atmosphere.140 This conrms the increased intimacy and ordinari-
ness of contemporary celebrity and in their communication with fans.
Gomez has not done any big tell-all documentaries, like Lovato has.
Instead the communication around her mental health happens in inter-
views, through her (and her peer’s) social media channels, and indirectly
in her work as an artist, which broaches mental illness and sadness in
general.
Gomez was an executive producer of the Netix show 13 Reasons Why
(2017-2020), which follows a high school in the aftermath of a student’s
suicide (and that was subject to heavy coverage by Teen Vogue). As men-
tioned in Chap. 3, the show became immensely popular with its target
demographic but received harsh critique from suicide prevention organi-
zations, teachers, and parents, who argued that it glories suicide and
simplies complex mental health issues.141 The fact that Gomez has pro-
duced a television show that goes against the message of traditional mental
illness awareness and suicide prevention organizations casts an interesting
light on her advocacy for mental illness sufferers.
Additionally, in the Spotify music video for her May 2017 single “Bad
Liar” Gomez portrays what can be called a “sad aesthetic.”142 The photo
promoting the single shows Gomez lying down on a disheveled bed,
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staring at the viewer with a look full of sadness and hopelessness. Her
hands are held together by a white silk rope, on one wrist she is wearing a
yellow hospital bracelet spelling out the word “risk,” and further up on
the same arm a band-aid. Fans started speculating in the comments sec-
tion on Gomez’s Instagram about whether the bracelet and the band-aid
were supposed to symbolize a suicide attempt. The photographer Petra
Collins claried (also on Instagram) that it had nothing to do with suicide,
but that Gomez had come straight from a lupus-related hospital visit to
the photo shoot.143 Even if this is the real story behind the photograph,
leaving the bracelet and the band-aid on results in an image that connotes
self-harm and suicide for most people who do not know the back story.
Interestingly, the above video is no longer available on Spotify and on
Gomez’s YouTube channel another, much lighter, video is listed as the
ofcial one for the song. The second, ofcial version, takes place in a
1970s high school setting where Gomez plays several different characters
in a family drama with unclear outcomes. An audio-only video of “Bad
Liar” that has the still image from the above-described video as its back-
ground is still available, but the full moving image lm is nowhere to be
found on the star’s YouTube or Spotify sites. This seems to be mostly due
to the fact that the video with Spotify was an exclusive collaboration with
that platform, but nevertheless it is notable that the more melancholic and
self-destructive aspects of the rst video are completely absent in the of-
cial one that remains available on the singer’s channels.144
Playing with this self-harming aesthetic positions Gomez somewhat
off-center of the “victim to victor” narrative and the idea of overcoming
struggles through perseverance displayed in much of Lovato’s celebrity
health narrative. In interviews, she acknowledges that things like rehab
and therapy have helped her, but then she nearly glories feeling bad in
her work as an artist and TV producer. Here she is irting with the “sad
girl” aesthetic embraced by self-identied sad girls on sites like Tumblr
and Instagram, which I will address further in the next chapter.145
posTFeminisT sadness
I want to mention artist Lana del Rey here as a means of understanding
the trends that circulated on the music scene during the 2010s. The style
of del Rey’s music and visual representations is similar to the sad aesthetic
that Gomez is experimenting with in some of her work. Del Rey, however,
has not spoken about specic diagnoses like Lovato and Gomez, and she
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is absent from the compilation lists of celebrities speaking about mental
illnesses. What she has spoken about is a period of heavy drinking in her
early teens that led to her being sent to boarding school at age 14 and then
getting sober at 18.146 Instead of saying that she suffers from depression,
anxiety, or any other established diagnosis, the singer has said that she
thinks “ceaselessly of death” and that she has dealt with panic attacks but
only attended therapy three times because she is “really most comfortable
sitting in that chair in the studio, writing or singing.”147 And most notori-
ously, she said “I wish I was dead already” while citing Amy Winehouse
and Kurt Cobain as her heroes, both of whom died at the age of 27.148 Del
Rey’s ofcial statements put her more in the role of having created a per-
sona of being sad, rather than adopting the language of mental health
advocacy in the way that Lovato and Gomez have.
Del Rey sings about female weakness and dependence in a way that
makes it seem like she is enjoying it. These themes are present in much of
her work (her rst record having the apt title “Born to Die”), but is espe-
cially visible on her 2014 album “Ultraviolence” which is dominated by
themes of submission and self-destructiveness in relation to various men.
One line that particularly seems to encourage the abusive relationships
portrayed throughout the album is a quote from a 1962 Carol King and
Gerry Gofn song: “he hit me and it felt like a kiss,” sung on the title track
“Ultraviolence.” The persona del Rey communicates on this record is one
that takes melancholic pleasure in not getting what she wants and some-
times hints at deriving pleasure from abuse.
As discussed in Chap. 1, del Rey’s 2011 debut provoked many by por-
traying a woman who did not know what she wanted in a popular music
landscape lled with women brimming over with condence and determi-
nation.149 When she released “Ultraviolence” in 2014 she was critiqued as
outright anti-feminist on the grounds of glorifying female weakness and
dependency.150 This was also around the same time as pop stars like
Beyonce and Taylor Swift embraced a popular feminism that encourages
female strength and independence. Del Rey’s message of female weakness
and dependence seemed to go directly counter to the strength advocated
by popular feminism at the time.
In contrast, when Gomez spoke about her choice to be open about her
depression and anxiety three years later, in 2017, she told Vogue: “We
girls, we’re taught to be almost too resilient, to be strong and sexy and
cool and laid-back … We also need to feel allowed to fall apart.”151 Here
she speaks the language of (post)feminist empowerment, but instead of
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empowering women to be strong she wants to empower them to feel vul-
nerable. Something changed during the time between del Rey’s emer-
gence on the music scene and Gomez’s call for girls to be vulnerable.
Scholars like Catherine Vigier noted already in 2012, when del Rey was
a highly contested artist, that she gave “expression to some of the pro-
found dissatisfactions that women continue to feel” despite having “fol-
lowed mainstream society’s prescriptions for success in what has been
called a post-feminist world, but who nd that real liberation and genuine
satisfaction elude them.”152 During this time other celebrities expressed
similar sentiments and were similarly contested. For example, Lena
Dunham’s show Girls premiered in 2012 and became the focus of many
contested debates about whether or not the dysfunctional and dissatised
characters she brought to the screen were feminist or not. Zoe Alderton
makes an analysis of del Rey in relation to the critique of her as non-
feminist, noting that she “represents narratives of female weakness, sad-
ness, and failure” and “speaks to a generation who feel cut out of their
forebears’ market economy.”153 Alderton specically states that the
acknowledgment of weakness should not be something that hurts the
feminist cause:
Admitting that we are depressed or hurt should not make us less of a femi-
nist. Natural human desires for those who hurt us, or for ill-conceived
romances, should not make us feel as though we have betrayed our gender
or let down the feminist cause.154
The sentiment Gomez expresses in her call for girls to be allowed to fall
apart is the same as Alderton expresses here in relation to feminism. Even
if Gomez does not name feminism directly, the reference to girls being
asked to be “resilient … strong and sexy and cool and laid-back”155 reects
the demands of a popular feminism “that focus[es] on the individual
body … [and] that emphasize[s] individual attributes such as condence,
self-esteem, and competence as particularly useful to neoliberal self-
reliance and capitalist success.”156 Both del Rey and Gomez, then, seem to
respond to a media culture that demands overt positivity and condence
of young women.
Rather than suggest that either of them was the singular catalyst for
more sadness in popular culture, I understand them both as giving expres-
sion to sentiments circulating in the shared culture and their success in
delivering a certain message being dependent on the yearning of
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audiences to hear about those issues. These themes will be further explored
in the next chapter, where I examine the gure of the sad girl, that in some
iterations is closely tied to del Rey.
A 2019 analysis of del Rey’s impact on music in conjunction with the
release of her album Norman Fucking Rockwell credited the singer with
making mainstream music more sad.157 This is based not only on the writ-
er’s own observations (as is common in music journalism) but also on a
2018 study from researchers at the University of California at Irvine,
which analyzed 500,000 popular songs released in the UK from 1985 to
2015 and classied them according to mood.158 According to this research,
there was “a clear downward trend in ‘happiness’ and ‘brightness’, as well
as a slight upward trend in ‘sadness,’” indicating that mainstream music
has become statistically sadder.159 This shift has only become more felt
since then, with the artist Billie Eilish taking the world by storm with her
sad and melancholic sound, winning ve Grammys at the 2020 awards
ceremony and composing the theme song for the 2021 Bond lm.160
In the above mentioned analysis of del Rey’s impact on music, Al
Horner traces the roots of del Rey’s sound to the niche music genre of
“torch songs,” dened as “a form of pop that is traditionally by and about
downtrodden women who suffer at the hands of emotionally abusive men,
but continue to love them devotionally anyways.”161 So while del Rey de-
nitely did not invent this sad genre of music, she was instrumental in
bringing it into the contemporary mainstream and use it to express “a ver y
21st-century sadness.”162 Horner also connects the shift toward a sad
sound with the changed conversations around mental health and illness,
stating that “in 2019, there’s innitely more room for discussions about
depression in chart music than 10 years ago, mirroring wider social
trends.”163 So even if Horner ascribes del Rey a lot of agency in making
this happen, I do not necessarily think it was only del Rey who was driving
this change, but rather that she was part of a wider social shift toward
more sadness in popular culture, that came as a response to an overtly
upbeat and empowerment focused feminine media culture.
The “sad aesthetic” displayed in the work of artists like Del Rey and
Gomez, combined with the multiple celebrities speaking out about their
mental health issues, reveals a complex media ecology. A star like Gomez
can announce that she wants to empower women to feel allowed to fail
while simultaneously creating art that irts with romantic notions of sui-
cide and psychic suffering.
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On the one hand, Gomez speaking out about her issues and encourag-
ing people to seek help can be considered as part of the postfeminist con-
dence trope. Encouraging women to “feel allowed to fall apart” can be
another way of “empowering” them to take responsibility for their own
lives. Even more so if the help one is encouraged to seek is to turn to the
traditional psychiatric system, following the victim-to-victor narrative and
understanding one’s sadness as caused entirely by neurological compo-
nents. This approach does require a reaching out for help, but not in a
messy, (directly) interpersonal way. The trust in the psychiatric system
maintains mental illness as something singular to be taken care of just as a
“traditional” physical disease. If the subject takes care of her issues through
medical channels, she can remain a “no-needs woman” in all other areas
of her life.
On the other hand, the increased presence of sadness and the raised
awareness of mental illness as something that affects a lot of people can be
seen as an acknowledgment of the impossibility of constant condence
and independence. Are Lovato, Gomez, Del Rey, and others signs that the
self-disciplining of emotions, the need to be independent and strong is
disappearing or loosening up? Is the makeup of the postfeminist and neo-
liberal subject changing so as to include (certain kinds of) vulnerability?
What is clear is that female celebrities suffering emotionally and sharing
that with fans is not as much of a tarnish on their personal brands as such
revelations once were. Instead an openness about mental health struggles
can add to the authenticity of a celebrity brand, especially if the star herself
is shown as working diligently to become better. In the case of Lovato and
Gomez, the fact that they keep encountering obstacles and subsequently
go into treatment, only makes them more authentic and relatable to their
fans. The popularity of del Rey’s persona and her sad music inuenced and
paved the way for the more straightforward sadness of a later artist like
Billie Eilish.
Employing the lens of Orgad and Gill’s condence culture, the expres-
sion of vulnerability seen in these media narratives primarily serves to make
the condent woman relatable and add authenticity.164 And in McRobbie’s
understanding of the perfect-imperfect-resilience triad, the imperfect is
only a limited expression of the constraints of the perfect, that always leads
to a resilient bounce-back to perfection.165 This does apply to Lovato and
Gomez in the sense that their stories of weakness ultimately feed back into
their celebrity brands as strong, independent women* and artists. But
when it comes to del Rey, I would argue that it is a bit more complicated.
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Opening up the artistic exploration of themes of dependency and vulner-
ability provides a space, however narrow, for sitting with the negative feel-
ings instead of immediately trying to get rid of them. This aspect of
sadness’ emergence in the mainstream pop cultural landscape is further
explored in the next chapter, where I examine how social media sad girls
provide more spacious ways of feeling bad.
ConClusion
Celebrities are an important part of the pop cultural landscape and the
ways they approach mental health function as models for how to think
about such issues in culture at large. The shift from media speculation
about what ailments a celebrity might suffer from (often in sensationalist
ways) to a climate where stars themselves speak rsthand about their expe-
riences indicates a turn toward more mental health-aware, intimate, and
relatable celebrity branding strategies.
The case of Demi Lovato shows how celebrity health narratives around
mental illness have changed throughout the 2010s. Their rst tell-all doc-
umentary from 2012 was focused largely on presenting a star who had
overcome difculties and emerged stronger on the other side (down to
the title of the lm being Stay Strong). Even if Lovato showed some vul-
nerability, the focus was on how they had emerged from past difculties,
resembling the victim-to-victor narrative in which a diagnosis is made,
treatment is had, and the subject is declared a winner over the disease.
Their second tell-all documentary, released ve years later, presents a more
complicated picture of mental illness and recovery (and aptly titled Simply
Complicated). The original illness narrative is questioned in the confession
about Lovato being under the inuence while lming the rst documen-
tary, and the viewer is subsequently presented with an individual who is
awed and constantly working on their issues, which appear as always in
need of management. This suggests that the ideal neoliberal and postfemi-
nist subject now has room for some failure and weakness, but these have
to be worked at to be repeatedly overcome. Lovato’s 2018 relapse, the
protable release of the single Sober, and the subsequent comeback in
2020 cement Lovato’s narrative as one of successful self- transformation
and reinvention. This was only heightened with the third tell-all docu-
mentary series about the singer’s overdose that was released in 2021
(where Lovato’s struggles with their inner demons were hinted at in the
title Dancing with the devil). While the celebrities who managed to go
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through public breakdowns and come out stronger on the other side in
previous eras tended to be male, Lovato’s narrative suggests that this is no
longer the case and that female* stars can now also recast themselves as
successful masters of their own lives by overcoming difculties. The gen-
dered aspect of the celebrity mental illness narrative is now not congured
so as to invalidate female celebrities who suffer, instead the female star
who is depressed or anxious and successfully manages it ts well into the
dominant “psychic life” of neoliberalism, postfeminism, and a market-
friendly popular feminism. The fact that Lovato has since dened her gen-
der identity as non-binary does not take away from the gendered meaning
of their celebrity health narrative. Instead it shows that sharing experiences
of traumatic events and having them strengthen one’s authenticity is avail-
able to celebrities across the gender spectrum.
The female illness narrative is emphasized in the case of Selena Gomez,
who at the start of the decade was dened as a “super can-do girl” who
stayed far away from scandal,166 but then opened up about her experience
of depression and anxiety in 2016. She has largely been cast as a mental
health advocate and responsible role model, and her case shows the viabil-
ity/marketability of mental health advocacy for a celebrity brand at that
point in time. This has been further highlighted in Gomez’s makeup line,
Rare, which is marketed as a mental health aware brand where 1 % of sales
go to support mental health.167 The line even includes the “Stay Vulnerable
Liquid Eyeshadow” which Gomez herself describes as celebrating “the
soft, ushed look we get when we feel the most vulnerable.”168 In this
instance it is quite literally vulnerability that is being sold, down to the
description of how one might look after a day of crying.
At the same time, Gomez has played with a sad aesthetic in her work as
an artist and television producer. Comparing how her work was received
with Lana del Rey’s debut in 2011-2012 revealed the shifting attitudes
toward expressions of female sadness and weakness. The subsequent suc-
cess of del Rey and the broader turn in popular culture toward more sad
expressions suggest a dissatisfaction with overtly positive empowerment
narratives and a yearning by audiences for representations of negative
affects like sadness. Something I discuss further in the following chapter,
which looks at the worlds of social media and how mental illness and sad-
ness have been discussed there.
Lovato and Gomez are examples of protable vulnerability, while del
Rey is more aligned with the sad girl culture I discuss in the following
chapter, since her expression of sadness is not something already overcome
in the past but is being explored as it is experienced.
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noTes
1. Beck etal, Celebrity Health Narratives and the Public Health.
2. McNamara, “Lady Gaga Penned a Letter About Living With PTSD.”
3. Franssen, “The celebritization of self-care,” 91; see also Bell, “From bad
girl to mad girl;” Fisher, “We Love This Trainwreck!;” Harper, Madness,
Power and the Media; Holmes, “Little Lena’s a Big Girl Now.”
4. In May 2021 Demi Lovato came out as non-binary and announced that
they will use the pronouns they/them, Blistein, “Demi Lovato Comes
Out as Gender Non-Binary.” Despite this, I have kept Lovato as an exam-
ple of how female celebrities mediate their mental health because the
singer was a key gure in popular girl culture for the majority of their
career up until this announcement. I am using the pronouns they/them
to refer to Lovato in the text, but I have not changed the pronouns in
older quotes referring to the star as she/her. I hope this slippage will not
disturb the reader, but instead serve as a reminder of the uidity of the
gender spectrum.
5. I have culled these primarily from compilation articles such as Roberts,
“39 Celebrities Who Have Opened Up About Mental Health,” and van
Eijk, “19 Celebrities Who Have Spoken Out About Their Anxiety.” See
also Altshul, “14 Celebrities Who Have Experienced Depression;” Bain,
“What 17 Celebrities Have Said About Having Depression;” Felson,
“Celebrities With Anxiety;” Forstadt, “Stars Who Have Opened Up
About Dealing With Anxiety;” Gavilanes, “How Busy Philipps, Kendall
Jenner & More Stars Who Battle Anxiety Deal with It;” Grant and Gomez,
“14 Celebrities with Depression Get Real About Self-Care and Mental
Health;” Hugel, “8 Celebrities Talk About Anxiety;” Naftulin, “15
Inspiring Things Celebrities Have Said About Dealing With Anxiety;”
Nelson, “13 Celebrities With Anxiety Disorders;” Proudfoot, “Celebrities
Speak Out About Their Mental Health Battles;” Ratini, “19 Celebrities
With Depression;” Selzer, “Celebrities who have talked about anxiety;”
Singh, “28 celebrities who have opened up about their struggles with
mental illness;” Tannenbaum, “30 Celebrities Who Have Opened Up
About Depression;” Truschel, “10 Actors Open Up About Their Battle
with Depression;” Yagoda, “Gretchen Rossi, Chrissy Teigen & More Stars
Who’ve Opened Up About Their Struggles with Postpartum Depression;”
and Yagoda, “‘It’s Okay Not to Be Strong Sometimes.’” These listicles
appeared on the sites of magazines like Elle, Marie Claire, Seventeen,
Harper’s Bazaar, the Hollywood Reporter, and Good Housekeeping as well
as web-only publications like Renery29, Bustle, Buzzfeed, and Insider. An
additional few were also found on health- specic sites like WebMD,
EverydayHealth.com, Psycom, and Health.com.
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6. Abad-Santos, “Meghan Markle’s honesty about suicidal thoughts in her
Oprah interview could help others;” Emmanuele, “Paris Hilton Felt
“Empowered” By Sharing Her Story of Past Abuse;” Osaka, “Naomi
Osaka: ‘It’s O.K.Not to Be O.K.’”
7. 33 celebrities (31%) said they struggled with anxiety; 28 stars (27%) said
they have experienced depression; 12 (11%) talked about having both
depression and anxiety; 10 (10%) named postpartum depression; and 7
(7%) mentioned bipolar disorder.
8. Multiple of the stars have spoken about their issues several times, but I
have only counted them once, and the numbers per year refer to when
they talked about it the rst time. I made this decision based on the
assumption that the rst time someone spoke out indicates what the per-
ceptions around mental health and illness looked like in popular culture
at the time.
9. Holmes and Negra, In the Limelight and Under the Microscope, 5.
10. Ibid, 5.
11. Luckett, “Toxic: The Implosion of Britney Spears’s Star Image.”
12. Melas, “Britney Spears’ 13 year conservatorship has nally ended.”
13. Duke, “Lindsay Lohan’s troubled timeline.”
14. Polaschek, “The dissonant personas of a female celebrity.”
15. Koman, “Good News: Amanda Bynes Is Doing ‘Really Well;’” Ruiz,
“Amanda Bynes: A Reminder That Mental Health Woes Flourish in
Our 20’s?”
16. See “Got-You-Where-I-Want-You,” Tumblr post, accessed June 22, 2022,
http://got- you- where- i- want- you.tumblr.com/post/158824899040;
“Sweet-Despondency,” Tumblr post, accessed June 22, 2022, https://
sweet- despondency.tumblr.com/post/147347687983/mothurs-
candid- photo- of- lucifer- and- the- angel.
17. Cagle, “Mariah Carey: My Battle with Bipolar Disorder.”
18. Marwick and boyd, “To see and be seen,” 150.
19. Ingrassia, “My Nine-Year Struggle with Anorexia by Brittany Snow.”
20. Truong, “Brittany Snow Spoke “Too Early” About Mental Health.”
21. Ibid.
22. Newberry, “Britney Spears hasn’t fully controlled her life for years.”
23. Farrow and Tolentino, “Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare.”
24. Melas, “Britney Spears’ 13 year conservatorship has nally ended;”
Newberry, “Britney Spears hasn’t fully controlled her life for years.”
25. Steptoe, Genius and the Mind.
26. Harper, Madness, Power and the Media.
27. Franssen, “The celebritization of self-care,” 95.
28. Nunn and Biressi, “‘A trust betrayed’: Celebrity and the work of emo-
tion,” 53.
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140
29. Lerner, When Illness Goes Public, 8.
30. Harper, “Madly famous: Narratives of mental illness in celebrity cul-
ture,” 314.
31. Martin, “‘Does this lm make me look fat?’ Celebrity, gender and I’m
still here,” 31.
32. Ibid, 31.
33. Franssen, “The celebritization of self-care,” 95; see also Bell, “The
Insanity Plea;” Holmes, “Little Lena’s a Big Girl Now,” McLean,
“Feeling and the Filmed Body.”
34. Franssen, “The celebritization of self-care,” 96.
35. Petersen, “How The 2010s Killed The Celebrity Gossip Machine.”
36. Ibid.
37. Marwick and boyd, “To see and be seen,” 139.
38. Ibid, 140, italicization in original.
39. Ibid, 139.
40. Nunn and Biressi, “‘A trust betrayed’: Celebrity and the work of emo-
tion,” 54.
41. Barker, Gill and Harvey, Mediated intimacy, 24, italicization in original.
42. Hearn and Schoenhoff, “From Celebrity to Inuencer,” 197-198.
43. Ibid, 200.
44. Ibid, 200.
45. Ibid, 200.
46. Khamis, Ang, and Welling, “Self-branding, ‘micro-celebrity’ and the rise
of Social Media Inuencers.”
47. Orgad and Gill (2022) discuss the inverse of this, in the sense that some
vulnerability is shared by condent women so as to make them relatable
(p.71).
48. Nunn and Biressi, “‘A trust betrayed’: Celebrity and the work of emo-
tion,” 49.
49. DeMoss, “Vloggers Changing the Dialogue on Mental Health;”
Fergusson, “11 YouTubers Who Have Spoken Out About Their Struggles
With Social Anxiety;” Tonic, “15 Beauty Vloggers Who Are Open About
Mental Illness.”
50. Berryman and Kavka, “‘I Guess A Lot of People See Me as a Big Sister or
a Friend,’” 85.
51. Ibid, 87.
52. Gamson, “The Unwatched Life Is Not Worth Living.”
53. Ibid, 1065-1067.
54. Khamis, Ang, and Welling, “Self-branding, ‘micro-celebrity’ and the rise
of Social Media Inuencers.”
55. Projansky, Spectacular Girls, 73-75; Ryals, Best Friends Forever;
Rutherford, Demi Lovato & Selena Gomez; Willen, “Selena Gomez and
Demi Lovato’s friendship timeline.”
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56. Harris, Future Girl.
57. Ibid, 27.
58. Projansky, Spectacular Girls, 4.
59. Ibid, 4.
60. Ibid, 75, 93. Projansky also discusses the racialized aspect of Gomez’s
celebrity at length, arguing that her Mexican-American identity is down-
played in most media coverage, but her visibility still “potentially opens
up reection on mixed identities and provides a potential point of identi-
cation for mixed audiences.”
61. Stables, “With Rare Beauty, Selena Gomez Has Rewritten the Script for
Start-Ups.”
62. Even though Lovato now identies as non-binary, they were still an inte-
gral part of popular girl culture during the rst part of their career.
63. Orgad and Gill, Condence Culture, 96.
64. Ibid, 96.
65. McRobbie, Feminism and the politics of resilience.
66. Ibid, 43.
67. Bonner, “Inside Demi Lovato’s Huge Net Worth.”
68. Hunter, “Demi Lovato Rehab.”
69. Cotliar, “Demi Lovato Has Bipolar Disorder.”
70. Bell, “The Insanity Plea;” Holmes, “Little Lena’s a Big Girl Now.”
71. Franssen, “The celebritization of self-care,” 96.
72. Russo (director), “Demi Lovato: Stay Strong.”
73. Ibid, 96.
74. Gill and Orgad, “The Condence Cult(ure),” Orgad and Gill, Condence
Culture.
75. Orgad and Gill, Condence Culture.
76. Bell, “The Insanity Plea.”
77. Ibid, 199.
78. Ibid, 201.
79. Ibid, 221.
80. Harris, Future Girl.
81. Franssen, “The celebritization of self-care,” 98, italicization in original.
82. HuffPost, “The Lovato Treatment Scholarship;” Lovato, Staying Strong:
365 Days a Year; Lovato, Staying Strong: A Journal; Macrae, “Demi
Lovato’s Book Cracks The NewYork Times Best Seller List;”
83. Stutz, “Demi Lovato Releases Bipolar PSA, Announces Mental Health
Listening & Engagement Tour.”
84. CBS News, “Demi Lovato now co-owns rehab center where she received
treatment;” Chan, “DNC 2016;” Puckett, “Demi Lovato Hosts Seminars
With Fans Before Future Now Tour to Discuss Mental Health Issues.”
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85. Demi Lovato, “Demi Lovato: Simply Complicated—Ofcial
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2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWTlL_w8cRA.
86. Marwick and boyd, “To see and be seen.”
87. Du Gay, Consumption and identity at work; Gill, “Postfeminist media
culture;” Ringrose and Walkerdine, “Regulating The Abject.”
88. Gill, “The affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism;” Scharff,
“The Psychic Life of Neoliberalism.”
89. Franssen, “The celebritization of self-care,” 96.
90. Ibid, 96.
91. Martin, Bipolar Expeditions.
92. Franssen, “The celebritization of self-care,” 92.
93. Illouz, Cold Intimacies, 55.
94. Ibid, 55.
95. Franssen, “The celebritization of self-care,” 96.
96. Banet-Weiser, Empowered, 13.
97. Ibid, 13.
98. Orgad and Gill, Condence Culture.
99. Blackman, “Psychiatric culture and bodies of resistance.”
100. Franssen, “The celebritization of self-care,” 99.
101. Gill, “Postfeminist media culture;” Gill “Culture and Subjectivity in
Neoliberal and Postfeminist Times;” McRobbie, The Aftermath of
Feminism; Ringrose and Walkerdine, “Regulating The Abject;” Scharff,
“Gender and neoliberalism;”
102. Orgad and Gill, Condence Culture.
103. Demi Lovato (ddlovato), “My truth... http://demilovato.co/sober
#sober out now,” Twitter, June 21, 2018, accessed June 25, 2022,
https://twitter.com/ddlovato/status/1009807182089445377.
104. Romano, “Demi Lovato’s Sober song reveals singer relapsed after
six years.”
105. RadarStaff, “Demi Lovato at War With Her Rehab Center Amid Relapse
Confession.”
106. Wang, “Demi Lovato Hospitalized for Apparent Drug Overdose.”
107. Bailey, “Demi Lovato Makes First Statement After Hospitalization.”
108. Recording Industry Association of America, Gold and Platinum Demi
Lovato Sober, website, accessed June 25, 2022, https://www.riaa.com/
gold- platinum/?tab_active=default- award&ar=DEMI+LOVATO&ti=S
OBER.
109. Demi Lovato News (@demetriaaalove), “Lovatics I’m starting the hashtag
#HowDemiHasHelpedMe. Please share your stories and positive things
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110. Amatulli, “Demi Lovato Fans Are Sharing Stories Of How She Helped
Them;” Newsbeat, “Demi Lovato: ‘How Demi has helped me’ stories
shared by fans;” Schuster, “How Fans Are Showing Demi Lovato She
Can Still Be a Role Model After Her Relapse.”
111. Harmonizer (@Enchanted5H), “#HowDemiHasHelpedMe P2: The
Night I Attempted Suicide Demi Had a Performance on Tv. My Dad Was
Watching It and Not Me. I Was Upstairs in My Room Taking Pills to,”
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112. Ibid.
113. Blackmon, “Demi Lovato Fans Staged A Tribute Concert For The Singer
Days After She Was Hospitalized.”
114. Kornhaber, “Demi Lovato Makes a Powerful Confession at the
Grammys.”
115. Demi Lovato, “Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil, YouTube Series,
accessed June 22, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy4
Kg0J0TkearxiMrCsHih5xJzttUe8JC.
116. Spanos, “‘Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil.’”
117. Demi Lovato, “Dancing With The Devil (Ofcial Video),” Youtube
video, accessed June 22, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=EAg69LaLlS0.
118. Martins, “Billboard Cover: Selena Gomez on Her New Chapter.”
119. Cauleld, “Selena Gomez Earns Third No. 1 Album on Billboard 200
Chart With ‘Rare.’”
120. Bonner, “What Is Selena Gomez’s Net Worth and ‘Only Murders’
Salary?”
121. Bailey, “Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber Drama Timeline;” Wallace, “A
complete history of Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez’s relationship.”
122. Martins, “Billboard Cover: Selena Gomez on Her New Chapter.”
123. Chiu, “Selena Gomez Taking Time Off After Dealing with ‘Anxiety,
Panic Attacks and Depression’ Due to Her Lupus Diagnosis.”
124. Ibid.
125. Mei, “Watch Selena Gomez’s Empowering, Emotional Acceptance
Speech at the AMAs.”
126. Avila, “Selena Gomez’s AMAs Acceptance Speech Was a Heartfelt One;”
Rosa, “Selena Gomez Tears Up During Her Emotional Speech at the
American Music Awards 2016;” Vogue.com, “Selena Gomez Breaks Her
Silence at the AMAs.”
127. Vogue.com, “Selena Gomez Gets Real About Anxiety—And How
Therapy Changed Everything.”
128. Brown, “Selena Gomez Is Grown Up, in Love, and Taking Control of
Her Mental Health.”
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144
129. Willis and Drysdale, “Selena Gomez Hospitalized For Mental Health.”
130. Langford, “Selena Gomez’s Wild Ride.”
131. Wang, “Selena Gomez Is Taking a Social Media Break;” Willis and
Drysdale, “Selena Gomez Hospitalized For Mental Health.”
132. Bonner, “Selena Gomez Reportedly in Mental Health Facility After
Being Hospitalized for ‘Emotional Breakdown.’”
133. Franssen, “The celebritization of self-care,” 95.
134. Dodson, “Selena Gomez Broke Her Instagram Silence to Reect
on 2018.”
135. Longman, “Selena Gomez Shares Brutal Reality of her 2019 Treatment.”
136. Vivinetto, “Selena Gomez reveals bipolar disorder diagnosis.”
137. Incidentally, this was the same hospital that Sylvia Plath stayed at in the
1950s and later chronicled in The Bell Jar. Other famous former patients
include poet Anne Sexton and singer Marianne Faithfull; Conradt, “10
Famous Residents of McLean Psychiatric Hospital.”
138. Vivinetto, “Selena Gomez reveals bipolar disorder diagnosis.”
139. Bailey, “Selena Gomez Reveals to Miley Cyrus That She Was Diagnosed
With Bipolar Disorder;” CBBCNewsround, “Selena Gomez: Singer
speaks about bipolar disorder;” Scott, “Selena Gomez reveals bipolar dis-
order diagnosis;” Vivinetto, “Selena Gomez reveals bipolar disorder diag-
nosis;” Young, “Selena Gomez opens up about bipolar diagnosis for rst
time during Instagram Live with Miley Cyrus.”
140. Luu, “Selena Gomez Explained Why She Revealed Her Bipolar Disorder
Diagnosis On Miley Cyrus’s Show.”
141. Saint Louis, “For Families of Teens at Suicide Risk, ‘13 Reasons’ Raises
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142. Alderton, The aesthetics of self-harm.
143. Carlin, “The Powerful Meaning Behind Selena Gomez’s Bracelet In Her
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144. Plaugic, “Selena Gomez releases new vertical music video you can only
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145. Alderton, The aesthetics of self-harm.
146. Heaf, “Woman Of The Year: Lana Del Rey.”
147. Cassan, ”Lana Del Rey:’Je me sens l’âme d’une guerrière;’” Wagner,
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148. Jonze, “Lana Del Rey: ‘I wish I was dead already.’”
149. Schrodt, “Lana Del Rey’s Feminist Problem;” Vigier, ”The Meaning of
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150. Shugerman, “Lana Del Rey: Not A Feminist.”
151. Vogue.com, “Selena Gomez Gets Real About Anxiety—And How
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152. Vigier, ”The Meaning of Lana Del Rey,” 3, 1.
153. Alderton, The aesthetics of self-harm, 100.
154. Ibid, 100.
155. Vogue.com, “Selena Gomez Gets Real About Anxiety—And How
Therapy Changed Everything.”
156. Banet-Weiser, Empowered, 13.
157. Horner, “This is how Lana Del Rey kickstarted a sad-pop revolution.”
158. Interiano etal, “Musical trends and predictability of success in contempo-
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159. Ibid, 1.
160. Messman, “2020 Grammy Winners;” Nicholson, “Billie Eilish: the can-
did, self-aware voice of a generation takes on 007.”
161. Horner, “This is how Lana Del Rey kickstarted a sad-pop revolution.”
162. Ibid.
163. Ibid.
164. Orgad and Gill, Condence Culture.
165. McRobbie, Feminism and the politics of resilience.
166. Projansky, Spectacular Girls, 75.
167. Stables, “With Rare Beauty, Selena Gomez Has Rewritten the Script for
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168. Rare Beauty, ”Stay Vulnerable Liquid Eyeshadow,” website, accessed
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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and
indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to
the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence
and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the
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CHAPTER 5
Social Media Sadness: Sad Girl Culture
andRadical Ways ofFeeling Bad
If you’ve heard the term “Sad Girl” recently, it’s probably in reference to Lana
Del Rey, queen of pop melancholy who has inspired a million #PrettyWhenYouCry
seles. It could have been on Tumblr, too, where lately teen angst manifests as
dip-dye braids and soft-focus bruises. Actually, when you think about it, Sad
Girls are everywhere—in the musings of Twitter personality @SoSadToday, the
seles of artist Audrey Wollen, creator of “Sad Girl Theory,” and on Etsy, where
you can buy Sad Girl necklaces, pins, vests, and tote bags, typically in pastel.1
The above quote is from a 2015 article titled “A taxonomy of the sad
girl” in the fashion and style magazine i-D, and I include it here because
it captures the multifaceted presence of the sad girl online at the time (this
magazine also declared 2015 the year of the sad girl).2 Like other internet
phenomena, the sad girl has taken many different forms and cannot be
easily pinpointed or narrowed down into one specic thing. This chapter
turns to the worlds of social media platforms to understand how mental
illness was spoken about in gendered ways online during the 2010s
through this gure of the “sad girl,” one most broadly dened as “a young
woman who is unashamed of her emotional life and who fearlessly acts out
her pain for others to see.”3
Several writers in the smaller popular press (fashion/style magazines
that cover internet culture) have written about how she appears on differ-
ent platforms, describing the kind of posts shared and favored by the sad
girls on Tumblr and Instagram4 as well as covered specic prolic sad girls
like artist Audrey Wollen,5 writer Melissa Broder (@sosadtoday on Twitter)6
© The Author(s) 2023
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158
and the collective Sad Girls Club.7 Attention has also been given to the
fashion trends of wearing your mental distress on your sleeve, so to speak,
with hats declaring “being sad is ok,” sweatshirts reading “emotional ten-
dencies,” and a brand called “Cry Baby” which has the tagline “i made
this brand to show you that it’s okay to cry.”8
So far the scholarly study of the sad girl has been limited. Several jour-
nal articles have been written about the presence of content depicting
non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) in online contexts, primarily from a health
care perspective that looks at how Internet spaces encourage or discourage
self-injury.9 There have also been a few studies from a media studies per-
spective about specic online forums for mental health support like Ian
Tucker and Lewis Goodings’ examination of the UK based site Elefriends
or Anthony McCosker’s analysis of the Australian mental health organiza-
tion beyondblue, both of which point to the importance of social media
and peer inuencers in the treatment and recovery from mental illness.10
Among those who have focused specically on the sad girl are Eileen Mary
Holowka, who has written about the way the sad girls of Instagram func-
tion as a community and a counter public, and Heather Mooney who has
examined the racial aspects of the sad girl in comparison to another affec-
tive gure circulating online, the Carefree Black Girl.11
It is important to note in the discussion of sad girls that even if this
gure was at its most visible online during 2014-2015, that iteration of
the gure could be said to have originated in the Chicana/Latina culture
of 1990s Los Angeles. One of the groups I look at in this chapter, Mexico-
based Sad Girls Y Qué, explicitly traces the use of the term to this context
and calls out other sad girls for ignoring these roots. I do not, however,
see this as a simple case of cultural appropriation, following an under-
standing of the term as one involving cultural exploitation and disrespect.12
It is rather a case of a range of sources inuencing a particular cultural
expression, and the multiple inspirations behind the gure of the sad girl
show the uidity of cultural sharing and creativity in a digital world. I dis-
cuss the specic aspects of this later in the chapter.
Zoe Alderton, from whom I borrow the broad denition of the sad girl
mentioned above, has done a meticulous job of studying the visual rheto-
ric of online self-harm communities and dedicates an entire chapter of her
book The Aesthetics of Self-Harm to sad girls and “the internet and the
performance of mood.”13 Alderton notes that the #sadgirl tag on Tumblr
contains images of self-harm and suicidal ideation but also involves “a high
degree of self-awareness,” noting that “while the sadness is genuine,
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performances are often overblown or ironic.”14 This distance and irony are
key to understanding the sad girl phenomenon, and by taking these aspects
into account one can move away from a simple “good” or “bad” value
judgment about young people’s practice of sharing dark feelings online,
which is often the case in the scholarly pieces from researchers with roots
in medical elds. Alderton’s approach is more nuanced as she notes that:
The Sad Girl is core to a new brand of feminism and philosophy that denes
the performance of mood online, revealing both why young women are so
sad and how sadness can actually be a way of releasing negative affect and
protesting wrongdoing rather than wallowing in non-action.15
I follow this approach in my examination of the sad girl phenomenon
as I hope to be able to open up discussion toward questions about whether
or not the sad girls are sharing a new kind of sadness, and if so, in what
ways this might challenge traditional conceptions of sadness and mental
illness. While the previous two chapters dealt with more conventional
types of media and popular culture, this chapter turns to the world of
Internet peer-to-peer networks and smaller micro-celebrities to examine
how mental health was talked about there.
This chapter also further opens up the connections between mental ill-
ness and sadness. In the previous chapter I traced the links between Selena
Gomez’s mental health advocacy, her use of sad aesthetics in her work, and
Lana del Rey’s embracement of a sad persona. In the analysis of sad girls
on social media, the connection between sadness and mental health con-
tinues as I consider not only mentions of specic diagnoses but also gen-
eral sad feelings like isolation, despair, abandonment issues, and general
disaffectedness.
In what follows I discuss how the sad girl appeared on the social media
platforms Tumblr and Instagram, and the specic cases of Audrey Wollen,
Sad Girls Y Qué, Sad Girls Club, and My Therapist Says. These cases are
all examples of various ways of sharing one’s disaffected/negative feelings
online, some explicitly adopting the label sad girl and others only writing
about feeling bad. There is a spectrum of peer vs. hierarchical groups here,
where some gurations see most users more or less equal to each other in
terms of follower counts and others take the form of a few micro- celebrities
posting to a large number of followers. This spectrum can be identied by
platform. On Tumblr, users were fairly equalized due to the distributed
forms of posting and reblogging (more on that below), whereas on
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Instagram the networks were structured more around a few inuential
users with large followings who obtain micro-celebrity status. Additionally,
there were differences between the various micro-celebrities, where some-
one like Audrey Wollen inhabits an activist and art-oriented position com-
pared to the more business-oriented prole of the account My Therapist
Says. I discuss these differences and the critical and acritical tendencies in
the sad girl gure, as well as the themes of relatability, impasse, dynamics
of coping, suffering, and normalization’s ambivalence. I explore how the
Tumblr sad girls can be read as playing with the potential of impasse and
resting in sadness by refusing to work immediately toward a cure, whereas
their counterparts on Instagram are often explicitly political. I also con-
sider the various levels of support found among the different versions of
sad girls and how they navigate the display yet disavowal of injuries.
Humor is a recurring aspect of the social media accounts I discuss here,
both as a form of coping and a way to create community through “shared
literacies.”16 This chapter also argues that some of the sad girls are exam-
ples of the kind of “precarity-focused consciousness raising” proposed by
the Institute for Precarious Consciousness.
The “feeling rules” of neoliberalism and the notion of relatability are
common threads in this chapter. Gill and Kanai point to the social “feeling
rules” (after Hochschild) of neoliberalism, of which the “condence cult”
and the relatable self are two integral parts of how women especially are
urged to express their feelings.17 They argue that this joint imperative to
condence and relatability put women in a “double bind” in which they
have to be “‘relatable’ but ‘condent’ in the appropriate proportions.”18
Throughout this chapter I look at how various manifestations of sad girls
and other discussions of depression, anxiety, and “feeling bad” are
expressed in relatable and not-so-relatable ways.
And again, these sad girls exist within the condence culture outlined
by Orgad and Gill, where the tendency by female subjects to share vulner-
able moments largely is a move to appear authentic and relatable.19 Even
though this is the larger media culture in which the gure of the sad girl
emerged, and some of the gure’s iterations are of the lightheartedly relat-
able kind, I argue that something else is happening in the expression of the
negative here. Whereas the vulnerability expressed in the condence cul-
ture is one that has already been overcome,20 the feelings of despair and
anxiety expressed by sad girls are often shared as they happen. The expres-
sions of mental illness and sadness discussed in the previous chapters are
largely examples of a protable vulnerability while the sad girl culture
explored here opens up more spacious ways of feeling bad.
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Affective ResonAnce
Anna Gibbs uses the term “affective resonance” to designate how affects
are spread and taken up among different individuals. She denes this as
“the positive feedback loops created by affect, and in particular to the
tendency of someone witnessing the display of affect in another person to
resonate with and experience the same affect in response.”21 In other
words, when seeing someone else express a particular affect the chances
are high that you will also adopt that affect. Among “sad girls” on the
social media platforms I discuss in this chapter, the sharing of affective
content by individual users resonates with other users and together form a
mutual “sad girl affect,” specic to each platform and sub-group of users.
Gibbs writes that “repeated experiences of affective resonance (whether
‘rsthand’ or ‘mediated’) produce a concatenation in which affect reso-
nates with like affect, so as to link otherwise unrelated scenes without
producing articulable meaning.”22 The repetition of the sad girl affect in a
recurring affective resonance creates a shared “sad girl aesthetic” whose
meaning cannot be directly explained, but makes sense to the sad girls
who participate in its creation and maintenance.
Taking it one step further, it can also be suggested that it is not just an
affect and aesthetic that is being disseminated, but also a subjective gure
of the sad girl. Jack Bratich has studied the memes generated around and
out of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement to gain “insight into its
mediated subjective processes.” He explains that “OWS started as a meme
by meme specialists and then mutated into a meme-generator, ashmob,
and platform.”23 Bratich denes OWS as a potential aggregator of subjec-
tivities, arguing that the movement “could be a name for an aggregate of
operations, even an emergent subjective gure.”24 I think it can be helpful
to think of the gure of the sad girl as constituting a similar “mediated
subjective process.” Through the sharing and reblogging of affective
images, the subject position of the sad girl emerges and becomes available
for users to inhabit. Via meme-tic sharing of content, a shared experience
of sadness is formed within the online communities of sad girls.
tumblR sAd GiRls
Tumblr started in 2007 as a microblogging and social networking site.25
The site established a reputation among the major social media sites as “a
comfortable place to be honest, weird, and maybe even depressed”26 and
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162
scholars have identied it as particularly conducive for LGBTQIA+ com-
munities and niche fandoms.27 It differs from other social media platforms
in a few signicant ways: it functions more like a blog than other social
media sites, the content posted is published to each user’s own Tumblr
page which is visible also to nonusers (the design of this page can be end-
lessly modied, something I elaborate on below). The social aspects of
Tumblr resemble other platforms in a few ways: users follow each other via
linear news feeds like that on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter; one can
post original content in the form of text, image, quote, link, chat, audio,
and video; and one can reblog or like someone else’s posts. Much of the
content that circulates among the sad girls has been reblogged thousands
of times. This number is trackable in a “notes”-section found at the bot-
tom of each post, each note representing one reblog or like. Study of the
phenomenon of the sad girl on Tumblr cannot include only an examina-
tion of a few users’ original content, but needs to follow the content that
is being spread in a meme-like fashion on the site.
Something to note in relation to all of the iterations of sad girls dis-
cussed in this chapter is the role of platform politics and technological
affordances. Bryce Renninger points out in his study of counter publics on
Tumblr that “with changes in platforms and networks of users, media
ideologies shift.”28 Such shifts contribute to the move of users from one
platform to another, or the “spreading out” of activity across multiple
platforms. The popularity of Tumblr has shifted since the beginning of the
time period that I am examining.29 At the time of writing Tumblr is still
up and running, but many of the sad girl accounts that I follow are no
longer active on the platform. Nevertheless, the Tumblr sad girl activity
that I discuss here was a big part of the site during the time period of
2013–2017.
On Tumblr, some typical examples of content circulated by sad girls are
pictures of pills in bright pink colors; animated texts that read things like
“having a threesome with anxiety and depression”; glittering words that
spell out “100% Sad” (see Fig.5.1); and cartoon character Lisa Simpson
lying face down on her bed with the word sad girl spelled out in the front
and center of the image.30
Posts like these position sadness and depression as a shared and com-
mon experience. Statements like “having a threesome with anxiety and
depression” do not portray anxiety and depression as by default negative
ailments to be cured; neither does it position them as something to be
ashamed of. Instead it states loud and clear that the person posting it is
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Fig. 5.1 100% Sad,
Tumblr post by Less-
love- more-alcohol,
source: Thelandersson,
“Social Media Sad Girls
and the Normalization
of Sad States of Being”
living with anxiety and depression, and has come to terms with it enough
to formulate the suffering in a distanced way. One post about psychotropic
drugs depicts pink pills in a polaroid-like frame with the word “Medicated”
written at the bottom (see Fig.5.2). Another is just a picture of a pile of
turquoise pills with the imprint “S 90 3.”31 A simple google search for this
code reveals that the drug portrayed is the benzodiazepine Xanax. Posts
like these both normalize and glorify psychopharmacology. There are also
those that communicate the commonness of therapy, like a photograph of
a framed poster that spells out “I told my therapist about you.”32
The archive I draw on here is not a xed or limited set of Tumblr
accounts, but rather content I have seen circulated multiple times among
the sad girls I follow on the site. I have been an observer of Tumblr since
early 2010 and have tracked the emerging sad girl content on the site,
which led me to follow the accounts that were most active in posting
about these kinds of topics.
I have paid particular attention to the posts with a high number of
notes, or reblogs. Due to its technological affordances like pseudonyms
and modiable HTML, Tumblr lends itself to a sad girl aesthetic.33 The
majority of these users do not use their real names, as is common practice
on many other social media sites. This allows for a more open sharing of
personal experiences and feelings that people in their everyday lives might
nd alarming, “abnormal,” or shameful. Several of the sad girls have also
taken full advantage of the modiable HTML, creating elaborately
designed banners, including moving glitter backgrounds and gifs that
reveal more information as you scroll over them.34 For example, user
Grvnge-nicotine has a header that shows a picture of Uma Thurman in
Pulp Fiction smoking a cigarette, displayed on a background of crystals
and pink pills. Surrounding, and on top of, this image are phrases like “I
hate everything,” “anti-you,” and “you little shit” in various gurations
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Fig. 5.2 “Medicated,”
Tumblr post by Grvnge-
nicotine, source:
Thelandersson, “Social
Media Sad Girls and the
Normalization of Sad
States of Being”
Fig. 5.3 Banner of Tumblr user Grvnge-nicotine, source: Thelandersson, “Social
Media Sad Girls and the Normalization of Sad States of Being”
and colors. In the top left corner of her site is a spinning pack of Marlboro
cigarettes, which, if you hover over it, reveals informational blurbs under
the headings “About me,” “Quote of the moment,” “Networks,” and
“Featured in” (see Fig.5.3).
When one scrolls down the page, the posts made by Grvnge-nicotine
are seen in chronological order, with the newest on top. This is the way
most sad girls design their Tumblr blogs, and it shows their posts lined up
together in about ve columns, creating a larger compositional image that
conveys a shared sad girl aesthetic by displaying several of their posts
together at the same time (see Fig.5.4).
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Fig. 5.4 Compilation of posts on the Tumblr account of user Grvnge-nicotine,
source: Thelandersson, “Social Media Sad Girls and the Normalization of Sad
States of Being”
Suffering asOrdinary
Lisa Blackman’s notion of “reframing suffering as ‘ordinary’” becomes
relevant here.35 She explains that conceiving “suffering as ‘ordinary’”
reframes it as “not an exceptional phenomenon, but rather part and parcel
of the costs of neo-liberalism(s).”36 By conceptualizing suffering as ordi-
nary, one can acknowledge the “difculties of living normalised ctions
and fantasies of femininity that [are] produced within [neoliberalism(s)] …
as signs of personal failure, inadequacy and the associated economies of
pain, fear, anxiety and distress that keep these apparatuses alive and in
place.”37 Seeing suffering as ordinary, and not something that can imme-
diately be cured or done away with, makes it possible to connect suffering
with the neoliberal power structures that control our wellbeing while tell-
ing us that we have endless possibilities to maximize our mental and physi-
cal health. The sad girls on Tumblr do seem to see suffering as ordinary, as
they rest in it as a part of everyday life that they cannot get away from. For
example, a post by user straightboyfriend that has been reblogged and
liked 42,304 times reads “its summer vacation you know what that means!
Isolation & severe depression.”38 Another post, by user gothicprep, which
has been reblogged and liked 58,058 times, reads “how do i contour my
abandonment issues?”39 Both posts imply a base level of constant sadness,
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and the ironic tone serves to establish shared connections with other users
who have had similar experiences. The connection of sad feelings (isola-
tion, severe depression, and abandonment issues) with usually joyful and
“normal” things (summer vacation and makeup) turns the negative feel-
ings into a shared comedic discourse.
Coping Through Humor
Within psychology, humor has long been acknowledged as a coping mech-
anism that can ease an individual’s experiences of stressful events. Freud
regarded it to be the highest form of defense mechanism, arguing that
“the essence of humor is that one spares oneself the affects to which the
situation would naturally give rise and overrides with a jest the possibility
of such an emotional display.”40 Later theorists have praised the humorist’s
ability for “rapid perceptual-cognitive switches in frames of reference,”41
which creates a distance that removes the individual “from the immediate
threat, of a problem situation, to view it from a different perspective, and,
therefore, to reduce the often paralyzing feelings of anxiety and helpless-
ness.”42 Within this reasoning around humor, the jokes shared by the
Tumblr sad girls can be interpreted as signs that this online discourse gives
the individual users participating in it a relief from their immediate prob-
lems and difcult feelings. Studies about how humor is being implemented
by various individuals have, however, somewhat complicated this notion
of humor as a coping mechanism. Rod A.Martin and Herbert M.Lefcourt,
for example, found that humor does reduce the impact of stress, but for it
to do so, “the individual must also place a high value on humor and, more
importantly, produce humor, particularly in the stressful situations that he
or she encounters in daily life.”43 Later, Martin and his students developed
the Humor Styles Questionnaire to assess how individuals use humor in
their daily lives,44 which has been used in hundreds of studies within the
eld of psychology since.45 The questionnaire gives individuals scores on
four different styles of humor: afliative (use of humor to “enhance one’s
relationships with others”), self-enhancing (“relatively benign uses of
humor to enhance the self”), aggressive (“use of humor to enhance the
self at the expense of others”), and self-defeating (“use of humor to
enhance relationships at the expense of self”).46 Scoring high on the rst
two (positive) humor styles has been linked to positive health outcomes,
such as “being happier and having healthier relationships,” whereas hav-
ing high scores on the last two (negative) styles have been linked to
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negative effects on health.47 A 2019 study using the questionnaire found
that people diagnosed with depression used self-defeating humor more
than nondepressed people, and that depressive individuals used the two
positive humor styles (afliative and self-enhancing) less than non-depres-
sive individuals.48 The relation between humor and wellbeing, then, is
more nuanced than simply “humor eases suffering and stress,” and self-
defeating humor can in some cases be signs of worsening (or unchanged)
mental illness issues. But the examples from the Tumblr sad girls men-
tioned above can also be read as examples of afliative humor that enhances
the relationships among the peers participating in the discussion, by jok-
ing about the conditions of living with depression and anxiety that they
all share.
The use of humor in online contexts has been analyzed by feminist
media studies scholars as a means of creating “shared literacies”49 in digital
spaces, with feminist memes in particular being marked as tools to create
“online spaces of consciousness raising and community building.”50 I will
discuss the politically inected community building aspects of feminist
humor in online spaces more below, in relation to the sad girls on
Instagram, for whom comedy and memes are a more central aspect of
their online activities.
Impasse: Acedia andMelancholia
Blackman and Ann Cvetkovich have written about the “productive possi-
bilities of negative states of being,” which seek to “to de-pathologise
shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feel-
ing bad,’ to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and
transformation.”51 Cvetkovich describes how the Public Feelings project
uses the term impasse to refer to “a state of both stuckness and poten-
tial.”52 She explains that the notion of impasse maintains “a hopefulness
about the possibility that slowing down or not moving forward might not
be a sign of failure and might instead be worth exploring.”53 Impasse
could be one kind of productive possibility, allowing sufferers to rest in
“bad” feelings without having to immediately work to get rid of them.
Similar to Blackman’s notion of suffering as ordinary,54 the concept of
impasse allows us to think about and process the power structures that
inevitably affect the possibilities of succeeding at a healthy life. Among the
sad girls on Tumblr, there is usually not an overt political engagement that
directly connects suffering to structures of power. But the mere act of
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resting in sadness, as they do, might function as an impasse, where the
refusal to move forward becomes a protest of the neoliberal demands of
becoming a laboring and “happy” subject. Examples of this kind of resting
in sadness include a glittering GIF that spells out “Self-destructive and
unproductive,” a picture of a white t-shirt with the text “I’ve Been Crying
All Day” accompanied by a red rose, and a fake resume that includes items
like “Battled Depression 2000-2013.”55 Posts like these present a kind of
opposite to the neoliberal feminism that urges women to “lean in” to
competitive work environments, and can instead be read as encouraging
the reader to “lean in” to nonaction, self-destructiveness, and sadness.
Two terms that can describe the kind of resting in sadness performed
by the sad girls on Tumblr are acedia and melancholia. Acedia, rst men-
tioned in early Christian writings on monastic life, refers to spiritual crisis,
inertia, carelessness, and intense feelings of disgust and disdain.56 The
term has generally been considered too religious to be used in understand-
ing contemporary depression. But Cvetkovich argues that “acedia helps
place the medical model of depression within the longer history of notions
of not only health but embodiment of what it means to be human.”57
Thinking of depression as an “embodiment of what it means to be human”
implies a rejection of a medical model that sees depression as something
exceptional to be immediately cured away, and instead assigns it a central
place in the experience of life itself. The tendency to conceive of depres-
sion as abnormal indirectly marks “feeling good” as the “normal” mood
for which one should always aim.
Adopting a model of acedia that places depression as central to what it
means to be human, allows a move away from seeing it as exceptional.
Instead, it can be viewed as something that offers an opportunity to pause
and break from the requirement to constantly be a prot-making subject,
and provide a chance to process the emotional impacts of life under neo-
liberalism. In their refusal to heal, the sad girls can perhaps be an example
of conceptualizing sadness as acedia.
Besides accepting sadness as ordinary, the sad girls on Tumblr can also
be read as displaying an idealization of sadness. This could be described by
the concept of melancholia, which has also been used as an alternative to
contemporary medical models. Cvetkovich explains that melancholia
allows for “a return to a time when sadness could be viewed in other ways,
including as a normative part of cultural experience, and even, most nota-
bly in the case of Renaissance and Romantic understandings that have had
a persistent inuence, as a creative force.”58 It is something that touches
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more upon sadness in general, a sadness that is creative and inspiring,
rather than the debilitating “stuck-ness” associated with depression.
There is also an element of pleasure in melancholia. Freudian psycho-
analysis denes the melancholic as “one who incorporates a lost object of
desire into her ego, so that she never fully experiences the loss, since the
loved one, even in absence, becomes merged with the self.”59 The lost love
becomes integral to the make-up of the subject, to her entire self-image, and
the incorporation of the loss takes the form of masochistic pleasure in love
relationships. The pleasurable and creative aspect of melancholia differs sig-
nicantly from the spiritual crisis and inertia of acedia. I think one can hold
on to both concepts as ways of thinking through depression and sadness.
In relation to the sad girls on Tumblr, melancholia can capture the plea-
sure they derive in glorifying sadness, and acedia the inertia that co- exists
with this romanticizing. Melancholia might be said to glorify feeling bad
because of its promise to produce great art; it is the driving force of the
archetypical tortured genius. In this way, the sad girls seem to partially
adhere to a melancholic stance. There is a dedication to artists and celebri-
ties that fulll this role of tortured and misunderstood genius. Lana del
Rey is the most frequently occurring gure in this context. The sad girls on
Tumblr adopt her affect by posting and reblogging images of her, some-
times with lyrics from her songs written on them. She even has a song
entitled “Sad Girl” that contains the lyrics “I’m a sad girl, I’m a bad girl,
I’m a bad girl.” Another popular del Rey lyric that is repeatedly reblogged
is “you like your girls insane,” from the song “Born to Die,” shared as text
atop a photograph of the singer.60 del Rey and the persona she inhabits (see
discussion in the previous chapter) lends herself perfectly to the Tumblr
sad girl aesthetic, shown by the frequency with which images of her and
her songs are reblogged and spread among these Tumblr users.
Idealizations of real-life persons who inhabit the position of (female)
misinterpreted and tortured genius are also common. The trainwreck
celebrities discussed in Chap. 4 appear here as revered gures. Courtney
Love, Amy Winehouse, Sky Ferreira, and celebrities who have had public
breakdowns, like Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, and Amanda Bynes seem
to reinforce a melancholic notion of sadness as romantic, mystical, and
inspirational.61 Acedia and melancholia are ways of conceptualizing sad-
ness beyond the pro- or anti- medical model offered by psychiatry. I
believe these concepts can explain the activity of the sad girls by providing
ways of thinking about the simultaneous resting in, and normalizing of,
sadness and the glorication of feeling bad.
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A Supportive Community?
It is in the collective notions of sadness that develop among the sad girls
on Tumblr, that the alternative conceptualizations of sadness move from
theoretical to actual. By sharing their own views of sadness on this plat-
form, it becomes possible for Tumblr sad girls to explore their feelings
together, and potentially provide support for one another by validating
each other’s experiences. The glorication of sadness found among the sad
girls here sometimes borders on the encouragement of self-destructive
behavior. But, paradoxically, the fact that these experiences are shared
within the virtual space intervenes in the gloried isolation and presents
the possibility of a supportive collective. On Tumblr, in the middle of del
Rey quotes and pictures of pills, more “positive” posts are found. For
example, a gif of moving text that reads “sext: I want to be good for your
mental health.”62 “Sext” refers to the communication of sexual acts via
text message, or, the text version of phone sex. “Sext:” followed by various
sentences is a meme that juxtaposes the sexual connotations of “sexting”
with nonsexual phrases for comedic effect. Saying “I want to be good for
your mental health” in this context communicates a tender longing for
emotional support and stability. This speaks to the complexities and
nuances of the normalizing discourse happening here. On the one hand,
there is a risk of glorifying/getting stuck, but in the very act of sharing one
learns that one is not alone and a kind of community is created.
AudRey Wollen: sAd GiRl theoRy
One of the most highly publicized sad girls was the artist Audrey Wollen,
who in 2014 gained widespread attention and media coverage with her
“Sad Girl Theory.” Wollen’s artistic practice took place largely on
Instagram, where she would post images of herself looking sad, often with
smudged makeup in the middle of crying and tagging it #sadgirl.63 There
was also a series of photos recreating famous classical paintings but with
details from modern girlhood, like a recreation of Diego Velázquez’s 1651
painting The Rokeby Venus. In the original painting, Venus lies naked on a
bed, with her back to the viewer and looking at a reection of herself in a
mirror being held up by a kneeling cherub. In Wollen’s version, the artist
herself lies in the same position as Venus, naked and with her back turned
to the viewer, staring at a laptop computer perched on a small table.64
Wollen also posted multiple photos of herself posing in doctor’s ofces,
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undressed in examination rooms where she went to get treatment for her
chronic illness.65 For Wollen this was not merely an expression of her own
feelings and experiences, but a political act on a larger scale. She describes
the theory behind it as follows:
Sad Girl Theory is the proposal that the sadness of girls should be witnessed
and re-historicized as an act of resistance, of political protest. Basically, girls
being sad has been categorized as this act of passivity, and therefore, dis-
counted from the history of activism. I’m trying to open up the idea that
protest doesn’t have to be external to the body; it doesn’t have to be a huge
march in the streets, noise, violence, or rupture. There’s a long history of
girls who have used their own anguish, their own suffering, as tools for
resistance and political agency. Girls’ sadness isn’t quiet, weak, shameful, or
dumb: It is active, autonomous, and articulate. It’s a way of ghting back.66
In this way Wollen directly politicized the sad girl and put her expres-
sion of suffering onto a larger scale. In interviews Wollen expressed dis-
comfort with “the hyper-positive demands of contemporary feminism”
that is xated on self-love, approval, and “making it cool and fun to be a
girl.”67 The problem with this, for Wollen, is that “it isn’t really cool and
fun to be a girl. It is an experience of brutal alienation and constant fear of
violence.”68 Here Wollen indirectly marks out the “feeling rules” of the
contemporary moment for women and girls that Gill and Kanai write
about in relation to neoliberalism and postfeminism, and of which the
“condence cult” is an integral part.69
Wollen’s work was widely covered in smaller popular press outlets and
art magazines like Dazed Digital, NYLON, i-D, and Artillery magazine,
and from 2014 to early 2016 it seemed like she was everywhere on this
part of the Internet.70 In the art magazine Artillery, Emily Wells pointed
specically to Wollen’s claim of sadness as “an inherent threat to the status
quo of oppression” which Wells saw Wollen doing by “challenging the
hyper-positive, self-love-or-nothing feminism that permeates the Internet,
and alienates feminists who are unable to subscribe to it.”71 This commen-
tary on Wollen’s work might betray why she received so much attention,
that is, because at the time, the feminism most visible in popular culture
was one of empowerment and strength, and the notion that feminism
could embrace a language of weakness seemed truly radical.
In interviews Wollen also mentioned singer Lana del Rey as an example
of a sad girl (alongside historical gures like the writer Virginia Woolf and
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the saint St Catherine of Siena) and praised her performative displays of
sadness.72 And as discussed in the introduction and in the celebrity chap-
ter, del Rey can also be read as a response to an overtly positive feminism
that does not leave any room for suffering. Alderton sees in del Rey some-
one who not only “represents narratives of female weakness, sadness, and
failure” but also “speaks to a generation who feel cut out of their fore-
bears’ market economy.”73 For Alderton, Wollen and del Rey are on the
same continuum of sad girls that display sadness and weakness that repre-
sents women on a larger scale. I agree with this argument and the notion
that the popularity of both del Rey and Wollen speaks to the frustrations
of women at the time. These frustrations were rst expressed among del
Rey’s fans and in the subcultural public online spaces that Wollen inhab-
ited, and later appeared also in a broader popular culture as seen by the
increase in celebrity confessions and the turn to sadness in pop music,
culminating in the rise of Billie Eilish in 2019 (as discussed in Chap. 4).
Wollen received largely positive media coverage and gained a following
of 25,000 on Instagram, which made her into a kind of micro-celebrity.
But her role as an artist and feminist activist put her in a different position
than the micro-celebrities usually associated with this platform, which
tend to be “conventionally good-looking or people who display status
symbols like luxury goods, due to the app’s focus on visuals.”74 Wollen ts
more into the category of subcultural or niche micro-celebrity, who have
large amounts of followers but remain unknown to the larger public and
are largely ignored by mainstream media.75
In early 2016 Wollen posted an image of her iPhone next to a white lily,
the phone screen displaying a sad-looking sele of the artist herself. In a
lengthy caption she announced that she had decided to take a hiatus from
social media, explaining that she had become “increasingly unsettled and
at times deeply hurt by the climate of online feminism” and her position
within it.76 She expressed discomfort specically in relation to her political
intentions and the ways they had been misconstrued on the platform:
… i worry my ideas are eclipsed by my identity as an “instagram girl” and i
watch as ppl whose work i really respect write me off and ppl whose work i
don’t respect cite me as inspiration. “sad girl theory” is often understood at
its most reductive, instead of as a proposal to open up more spacious discus-
sions abt what activism could look like. my internet presence has been the best
and worst thing in my life, and i owe it so much (so many friends! so much
knowledge! so much solidarity and hope!!!) and i also nd myself afraid of it,
afraid of fucking up, afraid of being misunderstood, afraid of trusting ppl…77
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Wollen’s doubts and her reasons for leaving Instagram speak to the
problems of cultivating activism on corporate platforms that value interac-
tion in the form of likes and comments, which often reduces nuanced
messages to bite-sized and easily digestible content. Wollen did not delete
her account, however; instead it lay dormant up until February 2019,
when she removed most of her old posts (including the ones about Sad
Girl Theory) and tentatively started posting again.78 This speaks to the
impermanence of social media platforms and how ckle internet phenom-
ena can be. What remains available of Wollen’s work is the writing about
it by journalists and writers in other outlets.
Wollen’s changed relationship with Instagram also speaks to the role of
technological affordances of the social media platform being used. When
I was trying to nd out what had happened to Wollen and her work I
found an article in VICE, titled “Remembering Instagram Before the
Inuencers” published in July 2019. In it the writer mentions Wollen
alongside other young artists who were popular on Instagram in the
mid- 2010s but who now have different relationships with the platform.
One of them says about the early days of Instagram (which launched in
2010) that it “wasn’t so censored … it felt more DIY and achievable. It
wasn’t so algorithm-heavy. I felt like it was more efcient. Whereas now, it
feels like you have to invest money and do sponsored posts.”79 This refers
partly to the change in the platform’s algorithm, which went from show-
ing users a chronological news feed of posts to one ordered by Instagram’s
secret mechanisms that privilege ads and sponsored posts. This is a
reminder that users of corporate platforms like Tumblr and Instagram are
always at the mercy of the corporate owners for whom prot-making is the
ultimate incentive. Changes to the platform affordances such as the algo-
rithm of the news feed that determines how many of your followers will
actually see your posts can affect both individual users’ engagement and
larger trends in who uses what platforms.
sAd GiRls y Qué: the(PResumed) Whiteness
ofthesAd GiRl
Sad Girls Y Qué was another group that emerged online in 2014. Based
out of Tijuana, Mexico, they described themselves as a “glittery, girl power
gang” that used Internet art “to retaliate against the culture of machismo
prevalent in Mexico and the world at large while reappropriating a girly
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‘feminine’ aesthetic.” Run by ve Chicana-identied women, the group
mainly used a “Tumblr-style Facebook page” to curate images of “alterna-
tive icons like Selena [Quintanilla Pérez], animated characters like Sailor
Moon, and sex-positive imagery” as well as post “heartbreak poems and
notes on depression and solitude.”80,81
For Sad Girls Y Qué the gure of the sad girl comes from the Chola
culture represented in the 1993 lm Mi Vida Loca, which takes place in
Los Angeles (at the time Latinx-dominated) neighborhood Echo Park. In
this context the sad girl comes from LA tattoo art where she is seen as “a
gangster chick with tears running down her face.” Importantly “this image
of a crying woman is not a weak victim. She’s tough and conveys a more
complex range of femininity.”82 An early denition of the sad girl on the
site Urban Dictionary, which crowdsources denitions of emerging ver-
nacular, conrms this origin of the gure: “A nickname that is Chicana/
Latina in origin, Sad Girl usually refers to a tough girl who has suffered
extreme hardships.”83
In an interview with VICE magazine Anna Bon, one of the members,
denes the sad girl as “any girl who is fed up with society’s standards and
patriarchy” but species that the gure comes from Chicana culture. Bon’s
denition of the sad girl here is different than the broader one laid out by
Alderton, which I cite at the beginning of this chapter. This exemplies
the differences within the gure and the uidity of the concept, showing
how the same term may mean different things to different groups. For
Bon and Sad Girls Y Qué, ignoring the Latinx origins of the sad girl
amounts to a whitewashing of the concept. In the interview with VICE
Bon indirectly calls out Wollen (who went to California Institute of the
Arts, or CalArts, at the time), saying “There’s this group of artists in LA
who call themselves ‘sad girls’ and they’re all white girls from CalArts. It’s
cool that the sad girl term is a trend and a thing, but the appropriation of
it is annoying and offensive.”84 This speaks not only to Wollen and her sad
girl theory, but also to the stereotypical sad girl as someone who has relied
primarily on “white bodies as a way of presenting depressive themes and
exploring girlhood.”85 In her analysis of sad girls and the gure of the
Black Carefree Girl, Mooney notes that the sad girl sometimes uses aes-
thetics from Latina/x culture in ways that constitute cultural appropria-
tion. She points to Lana del Rey’s 2013 video Tropico, a short lm in
which the singer wears clothes reminiscent of the Virgin Mary and works
as a stripper in Los Angeles as an example.86 Mooney notes that del Rey is
repeatedly shown “inhaling the smoke exhaled by her Latina/x consort …
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[she] ‘breathes in’ racialized space and embodied ‘authenticity,’ animating
her position as a ‘real’ Sad Girl. The narrative and surroundings are pre-
sented as objects, consumable by Del Rey and her viewers.”87
For Mooney the sad girl manages to resist the “affective hegemony of
white girlhood” by showing the “failure of normative empowerment
models” and the “problems with can-do girlhood.”88 But the resistance
expressed here will always be limited by the fact that the sad girl is “a prod-
uct of cultural appropriation and neoliberalism, and the affective legacies
of whiteness contour her emergence.”89 It is important to note these dif-
ferences and tensions in the sad girl before too easily embracing her as a
subversive alternative to an upbeat popular feminism, as in Wollen’s ren-
dering of sadness as protest. Mooney’s positioning of the sad girl in rela-
tion to can-do girlhood is instructive when thinking about the racialized
aspects of the gure. Even if the can-do girl is not exclusively white, white-
ness is an important aspect of can-do girlhood, and white images of sad
girlhood risk positioning only white girls as able to resist the demands of
can-do-ness. Mooney’s critique here also suggests that the release that can
be found in fully giving in to sadness/adopting a sad girl position/iden-
tity, as Wollen’s sad girl theory proposes, is mostly available to white
women and girls, as they are the ones that the empowerment discourse of
can-do-ness and popular feminism is aimed at. I believe one way of doing
these tensions justice, is to ask who gets to inhabit the position of unasham-
edly displaying their sadness online. As I briey discussed in the previous
chapter, the celebrities who have been the most vocal and visible about
their mental illnesses are white or white-passing, indicating the limitations
of that position. Among the sad girls on Tumblr, when images of bodies
appear they tend to be white and thin, suggesting that inhabiting positions
of acedia and melancholia are mostly available to white girls and women.
The work of the Sad Girls Club on Instagram, which I will discuss further
below, directly addresses this issue by focusing specically on women of
color suffering from mental illness.
instAGRAm sAd GiRls
Wollen was not the last sad girl on Instagram, however, and from 2016
and onward, a group of users on the platform gained large followings
through posting about their mental distress in humorous ways. The design
and affordances of Instagram are more static than Tumblr, with all users of
the platform having a xed prole that always displays the number of
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followers that a particular user has. This makes the activity on the site
more centralized than on Tumblr, with a few users emerging as the most
inuential in terms of how many followers they display on their prole and
how many likes their individual posts get.90
Studying the sad girls of Instagram thus becomes a look at the most
popular accounts and the kind of content they share, in contrast to the sad
girls of Tumblr among which posts are shared and spread multiple times
in larger numbers. Although Instagram users do repost each other at
times, this practice is not at all as widespread as the reblogging on Tumblr,
where content is spread faster than on Instagram.
Among the sad girls on Instagram, the most popular accounts were
generally focused on making fun of mental distress through memes and
other comedic portrayals. Astrology, leftist politics, and the disappoint-
ment of heterosexual men were also popular topics.91 The users who
gained the most followers obtained a sort of micro-celebrity status, but as
discussed above in relation to Wollen, the content for which they are
known puts them more in the position of subcultural or niche micro-
celebrity compared to the conventionally good-looking and luxury-
focused micro-celebrities usually associated with Instagram.92 Some of the
most popular users tried to turn their followings into nancially protable
endeavors, but the leftist/anti-capitalist politics of these users made their
economic aspirations more about supporting themselves and being able to
make a living than directly selling products to their followers in the vein
that social media inuencers tend to do.
One such user posts under the handle @binchcity, but also displays her
real name, Julia Hava, on her prole. She had 49,100 followers in late
2018, and at the time of writing in June 2022, she has 123,000 followers.
In the bio-section of Hava’s Instagram prole, there is a link to her per-
sonal website where one can purchase her memes as posters, t-shirts, stick-
ers, or mugs.93 Hava also has a Patreon site, where one can support her
work monthly.94 Patreon is a platform which allows content creators to set
up multitiered subscription programs for their fans, where followers pay a
xed amount each month to get access to premium content and support
the work of the creator. This form of nancing has become very popular
among digital creators, with several creative workers living off their
Patreon subscriptions.95 For the sad girls on Instagram, to have a Patreon
as well as selling merchandise, like Hava does, becomes a way to turn the
large followings they have into actual nancial rewards, without going
through the sponsorship deals that are common among more mainstream
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inuencers. But it is important to note that this does not necessarily mean
that their followers do contribute in any large numbers or at all, when they
can get most of the content for free on Instagram.
Hava’s memes often take the shape of commercial illustrations that
look like they might be from the 1950s or 1960s overlaid with her own
comedic words. One example is an image of a woman in a owing dress
holding a medication bottle (that looks like it has been photoshopped into
her hand) next to the words “Girls just wanna have SEROTONIN”96 (see
Fig.5.5). Hava has captioned the image “remember to smash your mf
[motherfucking] medication today everyone” and at the time of writing it
Fig. 5.5 “Girls just wanna have Serotonin,” meme by Julia Hava, @binchcity
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178
has 20,399 likes and 475 comments. In relation to Blackman’s notion of
suffering as ordinary, posts like these serve the same function as the above-
mentioned examples from Tumblr that connects summer vacation with
isolation and severe depression.97 In the case of Hava’s Instagram posts,
what is implied is not (only) a base level of constant sadness but that her
followers are all taking some kind of prescription drug for depression. The
phrase “Girls just wanna have SEROTONIN” is a play on several things:
the 1983 hit song by Cyndi Lauper, the 1985 romantic comedy lm, and
the more recent signage “Girls just wanna have fundamental rights,” part
of popular feminist branding and available for purchase on t-shirt, mugs,
stickers, and posters on sites like Etsy. The neurotransmitter serotonin is
widely known to be associated with happiness and mood, with the most
common class of antidepressants in most countries being selective sero-
tonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) which (in simplied terms) help the
brain to absorb more serotonin.98 By inserting serotonin into the well-
known phrase and urging her followers to take their medications in the
caption of the image, Hava normalizes the consumption of psychiatric
drugs and makes it part of everyday life.
Another example from Hava is a short video of her “medication haul,”
where she humorously shows off her medication holder and the various
antidepressants she is taking, in the style of the “makeup hauls” beauty
vloggers frequently engage in. A “makeup haul” usually involves a show-
and-tell of new beauty products,99 and in this video, Hava addresses her
viewers as lovelies before showing off two different dosages of the antide-
pressant Wellbutrin, one in a “beautiful eggshell color” and the other in
“beautiful blue, I would say kinda baby blue and it matches the medica-
tion holder, so perfect coordination.”100 By employing the language of
beauty bloggers while describing her psychiatric medications, Hava man-
ages to create humor and irony around both “makeup hauls” and antide-
pressants. Taking antidepressants and other psychotropic drugs becomes
as normal and ordinary as wearing makeup ever y day.
What happens here is similar to the normalizing discourse among the
Tumblr sad girls, but as opposed to glorifying mental illness and suffering
in a melancholic way, what Hava does is to joke about her mental illness in
a way that can be interpreted as crass and self-defeating (within the humor
styles mentioned above).101 Here again is an example of normalization’s
ambivalence. Presenting psychiatric drugs as normal and ordinary does
not necessarily challenge any systems or question denitions of what it
means to be mentally ill or healthy. In a way the distanced approach to her
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179
own struggles taken by Hava can be read as similar to Cosmopolitan’s
tongue-in-cheek writing about mental health and as a clear example of the
relatability Kanai describes in women’s media culture and that involves a
display yet disavowal of injury.
Within this framework, Hava and the other Instagram sad girls who
post similar content may be deemed to make light of serious health issues
by turning them into self-defeating comedy. But seen instead in a context
where psychiatric diagnoses are something to be ashamed of, the open
display of one’s diagnoses and medications becomes an act of deance
against normative discourses. The humor employed here can then be read
more as “afliative” in the sense that it is shared in a social media network
with the purpose of connecting to others who have similar experiences of
living with mental illness.102 The use of humor here may be read as dimin-
ishing the seriousness of mental illness, but it also becomes a way for suf-
ferers to connect to each other and (possibly) feel less alone. And crucially,
the display of vulnerability here is not of the kind common in condence
culture——where difculties are shared after they have been successfully
overcome——but rather a display of the real-time experience of taking a
range of psychiatric medications as part of everyday life. Hava’s medica-
tion haul then is not an example of protable vulnerability, but rather of a
capacious sad girl culture where humor is employed to make fun of both
the practice of keeping track of multiple medications and the consumer
logic behind makeup haul videos.
Another popular user is Ghosted1996 who only displays her rst name
Haley on her prole.103 Haley lives with bipolar disorder and frequently
posts about that and the medications she takes. The comedic aspect of the
memes is often accompanied by a critique of capitalism and the health care
system in the U.S.For example, one of Haley’s early posts is a mockup of
an advertisement for the antipsychotic drug Seroquel which is often used
in the treatment of bipolar disorder.104 A picture of a woman with wavy
hair is laid on top of the Seroquel name and logo and a blurry version of
the side effects text that usually accompanies medication advertisements,
and Haley’s own words spell out:
People always ask me how I attain my awless beach waves. I tell them,
‘Well, my medication gives me night sweats/terrors and I wake up drenched
every morning along with numerous other side effects (some dangerous)
that are irrelevant to the pharmaceutical industry because they care more
about prot than healthcare.’105 (See Fig. 5.6)
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Fig. 5.6 Seroquel meme by Haley Byam, @ghosted1996
In the comments section Haley’s followers express the resonance of the
post with one user saying “hahahahhahaahaha why is this me exactly wow
haha seroquel amiright” and others talking about how various drugs have
given them night sweats and other side effects. Another example is a meme
with two images of actor Shia LaBeouf looking distraught and Haley’s text
reading:
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Me looking at the state of mental health care in this country and wondering
how the fuck mentally ill ppl are expected to go through the arduous pro-
cess of applying and being accepted for disability benets if their own doc-
tors (let alone the state or federal government) refuse to take them
seriously.106 (Fig. 5.7)
In the comments section people are posting emojis high-ve:ing and
sharing their own stories of being diagnosed and misdiagnosed and pre-
scribed various medications, and of having to pay large amounts of money
to stay insured or simply not having access to care.
Fig. 5.7 Meme about the US healthcare system by Haley Byam, @ghosted1996
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Again, within the various humor styles outlined above, the comedic
style of Hava and Haley might be read as aggressive or self-defeating, and
thus more likely to belong to someone with a depression diagnosis and
can possibly lead to negative effects on health.107 Some of the humor dis-
played by Haley can be read as self-effacing and harsh, but the engage-
ment with both of the above posts show how such dark comedy also can
function as a node around which Instagram users can gather and provide
support to each other. This shows the potential of this platform and the
internet in general to function as a supportive space for individuals suffer-
ing from mental distress. Through the medium of humorous memes,
people share their despair and frustrations and can be made to feel less
alone. Haley herself said so directly when she was interviewed by Paper
Magazine in January 2019 after having been named one of “100 People
Taking Over 2019” by the outlet. In the interview she spoke about the
support she has gotten from the Instagram community, saying:
I’ve been running my account for about two years now, and the unprece-
dented amount of healing I’ve found in the meme community feels like the
answer to a question I’ve never been able to articulate. I’m truly grateful to
be a part of this space in time, where conceivably anyone can access free
content that assures them they’re not alone or crazy for struggling. For a
long time I felt like everything I went through was meaningless, but con-
necting with people who understand me and actually feel comforted by the
things I make has shown me I’m capable of creating a silver lining.108
This shows the supportive potential of these online spaces. The role of
humor here is similar to what has been described by feminist media studies
scholars in relation to feminist online discourses that employ comedy for
community building and consciousness raising.109 In the discussion of the
Twitter account @NoToFeminism, which uses humor to rebuke anti-
feminist discourse online, Emilie Lawrence and Jessica Ringrose write that
“the account draws attention to instances of systematic inequality and
injustice through humor rather than anger, frustration, or the sadness char-
acteristic of being a ‘victim’ of sexism.”110 The result is that followers and
participants are offered “new, potentially empowering, ways to understand
and engage with topics like the wage gap and sexual violence,” something
that Lawrence and Ringrose mark as “potentially therapeutic.”111 I think a
similar thing can be said about the comedic tone among the sad girls on
Instagram and how the humor becomes a way to distance oneself from the
difculties of living with mental illness and at the same time feel less alone.
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183
Another aspect of the shared comedic discourse created here is the lit-
eracy that is required to understand and “get” the jokes being shared.
Kanai analyzes this in relation to the Tumblr-blog WhatShouldWeCallMe
and the memes that circulated among the original creators and its follower
blogs. She argues that there is a specic set of “conceptual and socially
predicated readerly knowledges [that] enable the literacy required for par-
ticipation” in this meme.112 In Kanai’s example the memes are closely tied
to “contemporary feminine practices and digital cultures” and imply an
immersion in these discourses.113 In the context of the Instagram sad girls
the shared literacy instead concerns having personal experiences of mental
illness and psychiatric medications, and in the case of the examples from
Haley mentioned above, a rsthand knowledge of the US mental health
care system.
Possibilities ofSadness andPolitical Potential
Another aspect that complicates the relatability of the Instagram sad girls
and which is very much part of their shared literacy is the explicit political
engagement among them. Whereas the Tumblr sad girls can be read as
exploring the potential of impasse and resting in sadness by refusing to
work immediately toward a cure, their counterparts on Instagram are
often explicitly political. An example in addition to Haley’s memes about
the US health care system mentioned above is a post by user manicpixie-
memequeen. This meme features a photo of a woman lying down on a
bench at the mall, staring sadly into her phone and holding several shop-
ping bags. On top of the image a text reads: “walking around the mall
realizing that we are all slaves to the inescapable system of capitalism that
benets from the exploitation of our labor & our insatiable meaningless
desires” and as a caption manicpixiememequeen has written simply “sad
socialist memes.”114 (Fig.5.8). Another example of this outright political
analysis found among the sad girls on Instagram is a post by user @prozac.
barbie that features a photo of Kendall Jenner looking sad accompanied by
the text “real photo of me trying to reconcile my hatred of the capitalist
society I’m part of with my insatiable appetite for material objects I falsely
believe will bring me the happiness I crave.”115 By inserting political analy-
sis into the stream of sad girl content on the platform, followers learn to
associate also critical, anti-capitalist, thought into the experience of mental
illness, and connections can possibly be made between personal suffering
and larger, structural issues. The posts here could also be read as
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Fig. 5.8 “Walking around the mall/Sad socialist memes” by @
manicpixiememequeen
presenting an alternative to commercialized self-care discourses that
encourage consumption to soothe one’s anxieties.
This also speaks to the shared literacy assumed in these online spaces. In
addition to knowing what it is like to live with various mental health issues,
the reader of these memes is also assumed to understand and agree with an
anti-capitalist worldview that holds the above analyses of the consumption
culture and its role in society. This is similar to the ”insider/outsider
dynamics of being part of a clever, intersectional feminist sensibility” that
Lawrence and Ringrose describe in feminist discourses on Twitter.116 Here
the humorous tweets “encourage critical thinking by inviting audiences to
be part of a complex set of understandings about power and privilege” that
is part of this “intersectional feminist sensibility.”117 A similar sensibility is
being encouraged among the sad girls on Instagram, but in relation to
mental health and capitalism instead of intersectional feminism (although
these themes are also present among these sad girls).
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sAd GiRls club
Sad Girls Club is an Instagram account that focuses specically on provid-
ing support and quickly gained traction on the platform. It was started in
February 2017 by the lmmaker Elyse Fox, who after releasing a short
lm about her own struggles with depression (titled Conversations With
Friends) heard from girls from all over the world who thanked her for tell-
ing her story.118 Judging from the activity on her Instagram prole, Fox
did not have a large following before starting Sad Girls Club, but gained
micro-celebrity status after the club became popular on the platform (at
the time of writing she has 37,000 followers on her private account and
the club has 261,000 followers). Looking back at her posts there was an
increase in the average number of likes and comments on her posts after
Instagram featured Fox and Sad Girls Club on their ofcial account to
mark the mental health awareness campaign #HereForYou that the plat-
form organized in May 2017.119
The club itself, frequently with Fox as a spokesperson, received a lot of
coverage in various media outlets, including mainstream publications like
Forbes, SELF magazine, Women’s Health, and NBC’s the TODAY show
blog.120 This suggests that a narrative of helping young women battle
mental illness was something that was given attention in the mainstream
media at the time, and that aligning yourself with mental health awareness
causes was a good branding strategy. The logic in much of this mainstream
coverage resembles the language of mental health advocacy employed pri-
marily by Teen Vogue. For example, the headline of the SELF magazine
story about Sad Girls Club reads “How Instagram’s ‘Sad Girls Club’ Is
Busting the Stigma Around Mental Illness,” which aligns with the aware-
ness discourse that emphasizes the importance of speaking out as discussed
in Chap. 3.121 Representatives from Sad Girls Club also attended the 2018
Teen Vogue summit, showing the connections between the magazine and
this part of Instagram sad girl discourse.122 Fox also participated in mar-
keting campaigns for the beauty brand Olay and the fashion brand Monki,
where she was presented as a mental health advocate, showing the com-
mercial viability of mental health awareness at this point in time.123
In contrast to the accounts mentioned above, Sad Girls Club did not
only post memes for other users to recognize themselves in, but had a
clear community focus and arranged in-person meetings in New York
City, where those in need of support could come together to provide it for
each other. Fox, who is African-American, also emphasized that she
wanted to support women of color specically in their struggle with
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mental illness. In an interview with SELF magazine, she said that the tools
to treat and cope with mental illnesses are widely available, but what is
missing is a fair representation of who struggles with it. What is missing is
“a woman of color who’s saying, ‘I have a mental illness and I’m happy;
I’m living my life and this is how I do it.’”124 This is important in relation
to the above-mentioned tensions between the various denitions of the
sad girl and the stereotypical sad girl as someone who has relied primarily
on “white bodies as a way of presenting depressive themes and exploring
girlhood.”125 What Fox has done with the Sad Girls Club is to adopt the
term sad girl as one that encompasses multiple racial identities. By speak-
ing about the lack of nonwhite representations of mental illness she opens
up the gure for identication by girls and others from a range of subject
positions, not only white can-do girls who are fed up with the demands of
white girlhood, but also girls of color whose struggles might have to do
with issues like systemic racism and disenfranchisement.
Sad Girls Club typically posts content that focuses mostly on providing
support, like an infographic about how to help a friend with depression or
a multi-image post about the importance of ghting the stigma surround-
ing mental health.126 When thinking about Blackman’s notion of suffering
as ordinary, the activity of the Sad Girls Club could be seen as fullling this
notion by merely normalizing psychic suffering and advocating for the
acknowledgment of mental health issues as an everyday part of life that
affects a signicant amount of people.127 But whereas the sad girls on
Tumblr tend to rest in a melancholic stance that glories feeling bad, and
the other sad girls on Instagram rely on humor and comedy to come
together around shared difculties, Sad Girls Club puts the focus on sup-
port. This is not to say that the other kinds of sad girls do not provide
support, or that Sad Girls Club never posts humorous posts. The club
often posts memes, but the overall emphasis is on providing support to
other Instagram users and to create space where users can express them-
selves and share their feelings, seen in prompts to engage with each other
in the comments sections. One example of this is a post about what to do
if you have a friend that is sharing things online that makes you worried
about their mental health.128 Here Sad Girls Club is sharing a humorous
meme about posting negative things, but by asking what their followers
do in the kind of situation described they are opening up for a more seri-
ous reading of what might be going on behind the comedic and relatable
facade. And most importantly, they are encouraging their followers to
connect with each other, which in itself can relieve symptoms by making
those who suffer feel less alone.
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my theRAPist sAys: theAcRiticAl AndcommeRciAlized
sAd GiRl Aesthetic
It is also worth mentioning the Instagram account @mytherapistsays, as an
example of protable vulnerability in the worlds of social media. The
account was started in 2015 and reached over two million followers in its
rst two years (at the time of writing it has 7.5 million followers).129 It was
founded by best friends Lola Tash and Nicole Argiris, who lived in sepa-
rate cities and decided to start a shared account to post memes. By virtue
of its name, the account purports to deal with mental health, but the con-
tent frequently covered a more generalized worry regarding “their anxiety-
prone twentysomething lives: aggressive crush texting, impulsive shopping,
canceling plans in order to sleep.”130 On the spectrum of peer support,
micro-celebrity, and inuencers, My Therapist Says represents the most
acritical and commercialized version of the mental illness discourse hap-
pening on these platforms. The two women behind the account have
managed to monetize it by turning it into a multifaceted social media
brand, complete with an accompanying blog, merchandise shop, and book.
My Therapist Says rarely went into detail about medications or diagno-
ses, like the users mentioned above (ghosted1996, binchcity, etc.), and the
critical messages found among the Instagram sad girls were completely
absent. Instead the women running the account collaborated with big
brands like (makeup company) Urban Decay and (dating app) Tinder to
produce sponsored content to share with their followers.131 In early 2020
@mytherapistsays was also one of the Instagram accounts involved in pres-
idential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s campaign’s push to reach out to
voters via memes.132 This indicates the clout and presumed inuence that
the account posits also among the mainstream meme-creators on the
platform.
My Therapist Says is very similar to the Tumblr-blog
WhatShouldWeCallMe that Kanai studies, down to the fact that both were
started by friends living geographically apart who started a public docu-
mentation of their friendship in the form of memes.133 The same mecha-
nisms of converting frustrations into “funny, bitesized moments” which
“produce selves amenable to circulation in a gendered, digital economy of
relatability” are at play in both WhatShouldWeCallMe and My Therapist
Says.134 The latter frequently manages to take anxieties about working,
socializing and having a larger “put together” life and turn them into
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188
easily digestible memes. One example that plays on several layers of inter-
textuality is a photograph of Britney Spears riding in a miniature car made
for children (made apparent by the fact that she is much too big for it)
accompanied by the text “when u try to act like u got ur life together but
clearly shit is falling apart.”135 In the caption Tash and Argiris have written
“Forever always on the verge of a Britney 2007 meltdown,” a reference to
the public breakdown that the singer went through which was framed as a
“trainwreck” (as I discussed in Chap. 4) and has spawned a large number
of Internet commentary and memes.136 The follower who sees this post
will presumably recognize themselves in the feeling of things falling apart,
but then that potentially threatening feeling is defused by the humorous
image of Spears in the miniature car, and the person viewing the image is
presumably left just calmed enough to be able to participate in daily
life again.
My Therapist Says also follows Gill and Kanai’s analysis of the “feeling
rules” of neoliberalism and the display yet disavowal of injuries common
in contemporary media culture, in the way difcult subjects are taken up
but only to be immediately made fun of.137 The fact that Tash and Argiris
have successfully turned their Instagram account into a protable social
media company underscores the value of the “gendered, digital economy
of relatability.”138 The focus on relatability was even laid out in the ofcial
brand mission of My Therapist Says, which was displayed in their media kit
and in the advertising section of their website which at one point read “the
goal of MyTherapistSays was to be a relatable brand, speaking to struggles
of a 20 to 30 something woman who’s a bit of a mess.”139
The account is an example of turning one’s followers’ worries and
anxieties into literal nancial rewards, in the sense that it is through their
highly relatable content about everyday anxieties that Tash and Argiris
have built their following, and it is due to their high number of followers
that they can charge companies for advertisements and sponsored con-
tent. The two women have managed to toe the line of expressing frustra-
tions with contemporary life without sounding like too much or becoming
threatening, while also excelling at entrepreneurial adaptability in realiz-
ing early on that they could monetize their relatability. My Therapist Says
is thus a clear example of the protability of certain kinds of
vulnerability.
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A PRecARity-focused consciousness RAisinG
I want to propose that some of the sad girls discussed above are examples
of the kind of “precarity-focused consciousness raising” suggested by the
Institute for Precarious Consciousness. This scholarly activist collective
argues in their 2014 manifesto “We are all very anxious” that anxiety is the
dominant affect that holds contemporary capitalism together, and that it
functions to control and maintain the unequal status quo. For them this
anxiety is closely connected to precarity and the precarious living condi-
tions of contemporary capitalism. One dening aspect of the dominant
affect is that it is a public secret, “something that everyone knows, but
nobody admits, or talks about.”140 The secrecy is a powerful tool in keep-
ing the affect in place as it keeps it personalized and blame or cause for the
anxiety is placed on the individual rather than the larger social and cultural
structures which shape the individual’s living conditions. But the Institute
argues that the dominant affect can be broken down by exposing its social
sources, and they advocate a “style of precarity-focused consciousness rais-
ing” to move out from under the debilitating grip of anxiety. Taking inspi-
ration from feminist consciousness raising of the 1960s and 1970s, the
collective proposes a form of political action that involves “analysing and
theorising structural sources based on similarities in experience.”141 I con-
tend that the sad girls on Tumblr and Instagram are practicing a version of
such a consciousness raising.
The Institute presents six points of focus for such a practice. First,
precarity- focused consciousness raising must be “Producing new grounded
theory relating to experience,” meaning that political theory and activist
practice needs to connect with the experiences of living in the present
rather than older models for understanding power and oppression. The
Institute writes, “the idea here is that our own perceptions of our situation
are blocked or cramped by dominant assumptions, and need to be made
explicit.” Secondly, a precarity-focused consciousness raising must
“[Recognise] the reality, and the systemic nature, of our experiences,”
which involves afrming “that our pain is really pain, that what we see and
feel is real, and that our problems are not only personal”.142 Both of these
points are seen in the Instagram posts about the defunct mental health
care system in the U.S. and the prot incentives of big pharmaceutical
companies mentioned above, and the conversations that happen in the
comments section of these posts where other Instagram users share their
own experiences of navigating the health care system and trying different
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190
medications.143 Another example is a post, also from Haley (@
ghosted1996), featuring a picture of Uma Thurman in the movie Kill Bill,
holding up a sword that she seems ready to slay someone with. Above the
image Haley has written “me every time I try a new hormonal birth con-
trol, knowing that my entire life could be destroyed in the ensuing months
while all the cis men around me carry none of this responsibility or risk”
while the caption reads: “Anyone tried nuva ring for PMDD? Drop ur
experiences in the comments below.”144 Among the 193 comments people
share their experiences of trying various birth control, and together with
Haley’s original post, this becomes a small forum where a knowledge of
what it means to live through these things is formed and shared.
The third point mentioned by the Institute is that a precarity-focused
consciousness raising must involve a “Transformation of emotions,” which
they explain by saying that “people are paralysed by unnameable emo-
tions, and a general sense of feeling like shit” and clarifying that “these
emotions need to be transformed into a sense of injustice, a type of anger
which is less resentful and more focused, a move towards self-expression,
and a reactivation of resistance.”145 There is a transformation of emotions
happening among the sad girls on both Tumblr and Instagram, but most
of the emotions get transformed into humor and a sense of “not being
alone,” so there are ways to go before turning them into an anger that
drives action, which the Institute advocates for.
Fourth on the list of what a precarity-focused consciousness raising
should entail is “Creating or expressing voice,” expanded on as “the cul-
ture of silence surrounding the public secret needs to be overthrown.”146
This requirement is met by the sad girls by virtue of the public display of
their sadness and other mental illnesses, and the shared voice that is formed
within that discourse. The next point on the Institute’s list is the
“[Construction of] a disalienated space,” which would serve as a sort of
safe space to provide “critical distance on one’s life, and a kind of emotional
safety net to attempt transformations, dissolving fears.” The manifesto clar-
ies that “this should not simply be a self-help measure, used to sustain
existing activities, but instead, a space for reconstructing a radical perspec-
tive.” The more outright supportive accounts in the online sad girl dis-
course, like Sad Girls Club, are examples of this kind of disalienated space.
Although these spaces are more about providing direct support and relief,
there may be a few steps left before the radical perspective proposed by the
Institute is fully realized. The last point/issue that the Institute lists as
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191
crucial for a precarity-focused consciousness raising is “Analysing and theo-
rising structural sources based on similarities in experience,” expanded on
as “the point is not simply to recount experiences but to transform and
restructure them through their theorisation.” So this would be the practice
of using the knowledge gained through a multitude of individual experi-
ences to form a theory of how structures of power and resources work.
Wollen’s Sad Girl Theory and the art she shared via her Instagram account
and in interviews are examples of practices that seem to t with this point,
in the act of politicizing sadness as a protest against patriarchal culture. The
disappearance of Wollen from the platform and her subsequent deletion of
the sad girl content speaks to the limitations of using a corporate platform
like Instagram for radical political projects. Haley’s (@ghosted1996)
Instagram account was also removed from the platform in late 2021, due
to an unclear violation of community guidelines (but she is still active on
the platform under the slightly different username @ghosted_1996).147
Instances like this show the precariousness of relying on private platforms
whose enactment of rules is often shrouded in an air of secrecy.
conclusion
In this chapter I have discussed various ways in which young women have
written about their sadness on social media, primarily under the sad girl
moniker. For some sad girl gures (My Therapist Says), the feeling-rules
of neoliberalism are promoted. Others (Tumblr and Instagram sad girls,
Wollen, and Sad Girls Y Qué) contest them explicitly while others (Sad
Girls Club) are seeking precarious forms of solidarity.
Relatability is present in various ways in all of the examples of sad girls
discussed in this chapter, where the display of vulnerability is often accom-
panied by something humorous so as to make it less serious. But this relat-
ability is employed in different ways by the different actors involved. My
Therapist Says creates memes about smaller anxieties to sustain their brand
of relatability in a more lighthearted way that makes them appealing
enough for partnerships with big companies like Tinder and Urban Decay.
The sad girls on Instagram——like Hava, Haley, and @manicpixie-
memequeen——create memes about heavier topics that are relatable to
those who share their experiences of various diagnoses but also their opin-
ions on the US health care system and late-stage capitalism. In this gura-
tion the humor does not turn the experiences into “funny, bitesized
moments” that t into “a gendered, digital economy of relatability,”148
but functions as a coping mechanism that creates connections between the
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192
sad girls and their followers, who can come together in their despair over
the state of the world and their psyches. A similar thing happened among
the sad girls on Tumblr, in their practice of resting in sadness and the
exploration of the impasse of acedia and melancholia found there. Like
this the sad girls of Tumblr and Instagram represent a kind of rupture in
the relatability 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 laugh off. 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.
Regardless of the platforms, there is a key tension that runs through sad
girl aesthetics and communities: there is a risk here of glorifying sadness
and mental illness, but paradoxically in the very act of sharing one’s feel-
ings online one also learns that one is not alone. In this way all of the
examples discussed here do provide some level of support to their follow-
ers. In some cases, providing support is an explicit mission and cause, like
for the Sad Girls Club. While in others it is an indirect effect of a comedic
and sometimes irreverent discourse where followers might come to the
proles of the Instagram sad girls for the memes and to laugh at things
that are otherwise serious, but then indirectly they nd support in discov-
ering that others feel the same way they do.
By forming discourses where multiple voices and experiences of living
with mental illness get to be heard, alternative and multifaceted ways of
conceptualizing sadness become available in these online spaces. This
gives sufferers access to a potentially supportive collective of other suffer-
ers. Here, those who fail to be helped by traditional psychiatric discourse
can get a chance to be heard, learn that they are not alone, and possibly
receive non-medicalized modes of support.
notes
1. Hines, “a taxonomy of the sad girl.”
2. Newell-Hanson, “2015 the year of… sad girls and sad boys.”
3. Alderton, The aesthetics of self-harm, xx.
4. Devcollab, “The Reign Of The Internet Sad Girl Is Over;” Joho, “How
being sad, depressed, and anxious online became trendy;” Mondalek,
“When did it become cool to be a ‘sad girl’?;” Petrarca, “A Memes to an
End;” Saxelby, “Meet Bunny Michael, The Artist Whose Tragicomic
Memes Say What Everyone Is Feeling.”
F. THELANDERSSON

193
5. Barron, “richard prince, audrey wollen, and the sad girl theory;”
Tunnicliffe, “Audrey Wollen On The Power of Sadness;” Watson, “How
girls are nding empowerment through being sad online;” Wells, “Audrey
Wollen’s Feminist Instagram World.”
6. Montgomery, “@SoSadToday: Twitter’s Favorite Depressive Breaks Her
Silence;” Vozick-Levinson, “@SoSadToday Reveals Herself.”
7. Decaille, “Elyse Fox’s “Sad Girls Club” Challenges The Narrative About
Women Of Color & Mental Health;” Fluker, “How Founder Of Sad
Girls Club Tackles Mental Health Issues Online;” Jacoby, “How
Instagram’s ‘Sad Girls Club’ Is Busting the Stigma Around Mental
Illness;” Ross, “Elyse Fox: ‘I Was Labeled As The Angry Black Woman.”
8. Jennings, “Wearing Your Emotions on Your Sleeve;” Pandika, “Sad cul-
ture normalizes mental illness.”
9. Duggan etal, “An Examination of the Scope and Nature of Non-Suicidal
Self-Injury Online Activities;” Jadayel, Medlej, and Jadayel, “Mental
Disorders: a Glamorous Attraction on Social Media?;” Seko etal, “On
the creative edge: Exploring motivations for creating non-suicidal self-
injury content online;” Whitlock, Powers, and Eckenrode, “The virtual
cutting edge: The Internet and adolescent self-injury.”
10. McCosker, “Engaging mental health online;” Tucker and Goodings,
“Medicated bodies: Mental distress, social media and affect.”
11. Holowka, “Between artice and emotion: the “sad girls” of Instagram;”
Mooney, “Sad Girls and Carefree Black Girls;” My own piece about
Tumblr sad girls was published in Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect
Inquiry in 2017, and part of what I discussed there is repeated here, and
can thus be seen to have contributed to the scholarly conversation about
sad girls as well, Thelandersson, “Social Media Sad Girls and the
Normalization of Sad States of Being.”
12. Gray, “The Question of Cultural Appropriation.”
13. Alderton, The aesthetics of self-harm, 95.
14. Ibid, 95.
15. Ibid, 95, italicization in original.
16. Kanai, “Sociality and Classication: Reading Gender, Race, and Class in a
Humorous Meme.”
17. Gill and Kanai, “Mediating Neoliberal Capitalism;” Hochschild, The
Managed Heart.
18. Gill and Kanai, “Mediating Neoliberal Capitalism,” 323.
19. Orgad and Gill, Condence Culture.
20. Ibid, 96.
21. Gibbs, “Apparently unrelated: Affective resonance, concatenation and
traumatic circuitry in the terrain of the ever yday,” 131-132.
22. Ibid, 133.
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194
23. Bratich, “Occupy All the Dispositifs,” 2.
24. Ibid, 3.
25. Alfonso, “The real origins of Tumblr.”
26. Premack, “Tumblr’s Depression Connection.”
27. Cho, “Default publicness: Queer youth of color, social media, and being
outed by the machine;” Fink and Miller, “Trans media moments: Tumblr,
2011-2013;” Morimoto and Stein, “Tumblr and fandom.”
28. Renninger, “’Where I can be myself… where I can speak my mind,’” 5.
29. In a 2018 study of the most popular social media platforms among col-
lege students Tumblr did not make the cut as one of the top sites, as not
enough participants named it as their favorite platform. Shane-Simpson
et al, “Why do college students prefer Facebook, Twitter, or
Instagram?,” 279.
30. Grvnge-nicotine, ”Medicated,” Tumblr post, accessed June 22, 2022,
https://grvnge- nicotine.tumblr.com/post/115523875193/grunge-
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32. Sweet-despondency, “I told my therapist about you,” Tumblr post,
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post/148574795828.
33. Alderton, The aesthetics of self-harm; Renninger, “’Where I can be
myself… where I can speak my mind.’”
34. See http://grvnge- nicotine.tumblr.com and http://hollywood- noir.
tumblr.com, both accessed June 22, 2022.
35. Blackman, “Affective politics, debility and hearing voices,” 26. See also
Blackman, Hearing Voices; Blackman and Walkerdine, Mass hysteria.
36. Blackman, “Affective politics, debility and hearing voices,” 26.
37. Ibid, 26.
38. Straightboyfriend, “its summer vacation you know what that means!,”
Tumblr post, accessed June 22, 2022, https://straightboyfriend.tumblr.
com/post/145484278234/its- summer- vacation- you- know-
what- that- means.
39. Gothicprep, “how do i contour my abandonment issues?,” Tumblr post,
accessed June 22, 2022, https://gothicprep.tumblr.com/post/
139090742155/how- do- i- contour- my- abandonment- issues.
F. THELANDERSSON

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40. Freud, “Humour,” 216. See also Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious.
41. O’Connell, “Freudian humour,” 327.
42. Martin and Lefcourt, “Sense of humor as a moderator of the relation
between stressors and moods,” 1314.
43. Ibid, 1322.
44. Martin etal, “Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation
to psychological well-being.”
45. Greengross, “The Relationship Between Humor and Depression.”
46. Martin etal, “Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation
to psychological well-being,” 48.
47. Greengross, “The Relationship Between Humor and Depression.”
48. Kfrerer, Martin and Schermer, “A behavior genetic analysis of the rela-
tionship between humor styles and depression.”
49. Kanai, “Sociality and Classication: Reading Gender, Race, and Class in a
Humorous Meme.”
50. Rentschler and Thrift, “Doing feminism in the network,” 329; see also
Lawrence and Ringrose, “@Notofeminism, #Feministsareugly, and
Misandry Memes.”
51. Blackman, “Affective politics, debility and hearing voices,” 25.
52. Cvetkovich, Depression: A public feeling, 21.
53. Ibid, 21.
54. Blackman, “Affective politics, debility and hearing voices.”
55. Hollywood-noir, “Self-destructive and unproductive,” Tumblr post,
accessed June 22, 2022, https://hollywood- noir.tumblr.com/
post/141516412702; Paintdeath, “I’ve Been Crying All Day,” Tumblr
post, accessed June 22, 2022, https://paintdeath.tumblr.com/
post/146787727149/cant- wait- to- wear- this- everyday; Fattyacidtrip,
“Trying to write my resume like…,” Tumblr post, accessed June 22,
2022, https://fattyacidtrip.tumblr.com/post/103235397341.
56. Cvetkovich, Depression: A public feeling, 85.
57. Ibid, 102.
58. Ibid, 107.
59. Berlant, Desire/Love, 29.
60. m1nd--0ver—matter, “You like your girls insane,” Tumblr post, accessed
June 22, 2022, https://m1nd%2D%2D0ver%2D%2Dmatter.tumblr.
com/post/120501681047.
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http://got- you- where- i- want- you.tumblr.com/post/158824899040;
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sweet- despondency.tumblr.com/post/147347687983/
mothurs- candid- photo- of- lucifer- and- the- angel.
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62. Hollywood-noir, “sext: I want to be good for your mental health,”
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63. Holowka, “Between artice and emotion: the “sad girls” of Instagram.”
64. Gonzalez and Wollen, “In Conversation with Mira Gonzalez;” Watson,
“How girls are nding empowerment through being sad online.”
65. Wells, “Audrey Wollen’s Feminist Instagram World.”
66. Wollen in Tunnicliffe, “Audrey Wollen On The Power of Sadness.”
67. Wollen in Barron, “richard prince, audrey wollen, and the sad girl theory.”
68. Ibid.
69. Gill and Kanai, “Mediating Neoliberal Capitalism;” Gill and Orgad, “The
Condence Cult(ure);” Orgad and Gill, Condence Culture.
70. Barron, “richard prince, audrey wollen, and the sad girl theory;”
Tunnicliffe, “Audrey Wollen On The Power of Sadness;” Watson, “How
girls are nding empowerment through being sad online;” Wells, “Audrey
Wollen’s Feminist Instagram World.”
71. Wells, “Audrey Wollen’s Feminist Instagram World.”
72. Barron, “richard prince, audrey wollen, and the sad girl theory.”
73. Alderton, The aesthetics of self-harm, 100.
74. Marwick, “Instafame: Luxury seles in the attention economy,” 334.
75. Ibid.
76. Wollen in Eler, “Panel This is What Feminism 4.0 Looks Like.”
77. Ibid.
78. Jones, “Remembering Instagram Before the Inuencers.”
79. Ibid.
80. Calderón-Douglass, “Sad Girls y Qué Are Breaking Down Machismo
with Internet Art;” Eden, “Sad Girls Y Qué.”
81. The group also had a Twitter account, and at the time of writing both this
and the Facebook page are still available, but they have not been active
since April 2016.
82. Calderón-Douglass, “Sad Girls y Qué Are Breaking Down Machismo
with Internet Art.”
83. Urban Dictionary, “Sad Girl,” website entry, September 7, 2006, accessed
June 25, 2022, https://www.urbandictionary.com/dene.php?term=
Sad%20Girl.
84. Calderón-Douglass, “Sad Girls y Qué Are Breaking Down Machismo
with Internet Art.”
85. Alderton, The aesthetics of self-harm, 106.
86. Lana del Rey, “Tropico (Short Film),” Youtube video, December 6,
2013, accessed June 25, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=VwuHOQLSpEg.
87. Mooney, “Sad Girls and Carefree Black Girls,” 184.
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197
88. Ibid, 184, 190.
89. Ibid, 190.
90. In 2019 Instagram started experimenting with removing the total num-
ber of likes from a post, for a while users in several countries could no
longer display how many likes singular posts received. At the time of writ-
ing, however, users can choose to either show or hide the exact number
of likes a particular post has received; Leventhal, “How removing ‘likes’
from Instagram could affect our mental health.”
91. @manicpixiememequeen, “i’ll be posting sun sign moodboards over the
next few days,” Instagram post, March 13, 2017, accessed June 22, 2022,
https://www.instagram.com/p/BRjx_shFMuD/; Julia Hava (@binchc-
ity), “Thanks for all your submissions. Luckily this series has no end in
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92. Marwick, “Instafame: Luxury seles in the attention economy.”
93. “Binch City—Home,” website, last accessed March 10, 2020, no longer
available, https://www.binchcity.com/.
94. Julia Hava, “Julia Hava is creating a queenly community,” website,
accessed June 25, 2022, https://www.patreon.com/binchcity.
95. Robertson, “Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture.”
96. Julia Hava (@binchcity), “remember to smash your mf medication today
everyone,” Instagram post, July 27, 2018, accessed June 22, 2022,
https://www.instagram.com/p/BltivEhHdym/.
97. Blackman, “Affective politics, debility and hearing voices.”
98. Young, “How to increase serotonin in the human brain without drugs.”
99. Pai, “18 New Beauty Slang Words You Need to Know.”
100. Julia Hava (@binchcity), “Hi Lovelies! This is my ~Medication Haul~
Should I make more videos?,” Instagram post, March 2, 2017, accessed
June 22, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/BRJU8CHh44X/.
101. Martin etal, “Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation
to psychological well-being.”
102. Ibid.
103. Haley had 59,000 followers in late 2018, and toward the end of 2021,
she had 110,000 followers. In December 2021, however, her account
was disabled for unknown reasons and she started a backup account titled
@ghosted_1996, Haley Byam (@ghosted_1996), “someone please tell
me what to do,” Instagram post, December 8, 2021, accessed June 27,
2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/CXO6K- TPJU6/?hl=en.
5 SOCIAL MEDIA SADNESS: SAD GIRL CULTURE AND RADICAL WAYS…

198
104. Haley Byam (@ghosted1996), “An old hardcore mood,” Instagram post,
https://www.instagram.com/p/BUq1z_1FVi9/, the post is no longer
available at this link because Haley’s account was suspended by Instagram
and since late 2021 she has a new one under the slightly different user-
name @ghosted_1996, see note 102.
105. Ibid.
106. Haley Byam (@ghosted1996), “Um this had a typo so reposting lol I hate
myself but Raise your hand if mental healthcare/pharma has actually
drastically worsened your illness but you’re still dependent on it,”
Instagram post, https://www.instagram.com/p/BVvCOzolI5i/, just as
with the post referenced in note 102, this post is no longer available.
107. Greengross, “The Relationship Between Humor and Depression;”
Kfrerer, Martin and Schermer, “A behavior genetic analysis of the rela-
tionship between humor styles and depression.”
108. Paper Magazine, “PAPER Predictions: 100 People Taking Off in 2019.”
109. Rentschler and Thrift, “Doing feminism in the network.”
110. Lawrence and Ringrose, “@Notofeminism, #Feministsareugly, and
Misandry Memes,” 218.
111. Ibid, 218.
112. Kanai, “Sociality and Classication: Reading Gender, Race, and Class in a
Humorous Meme,” 4.
113. Ibid, 4.
114. @manicpixiememequeen, “sad socialist memes,” Instagram post, April
22, 2017, accessed June 22, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/
BTMnBoGF3QS/.
115. Prozac.barbie, “happy materialism season!!,” Instagram post, December
23, 2017, accessed June 22, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/
BdBwmvFF0zo/.
116. Lawrence and Ringrose, “@Notofeminism, #Feministsareugly, and
Misandry Memes,” 218.
117. Ibid, 218.
118. Elyse Fox, “Conversations with Friends,” Vimeo video, accessed June 25,
2022, https://vimeo.com/196129642; Jacoby, “How Instagram’s ‘Sad
Girls Club’ Is Busting the Stigma Around Mental Illness.”
119. Elyse Fox (@elyse.fox), “What a Monday morning treat Thank you so
much @instagram for spotlighting my newest initiative @sadgirlsclub,”
Instagram post, last accessed July 7, 2020, has since been deleted,
https://www.instagram.com/p/BT1aeusluAM/.
120. Fluker, “How Founder Of Sad Girls Club Tackles Mental Health Issues
Online;” Jacoby, “How Instagram’s ‘Sad Girls Club’ Is Busting the
Stigma Around Mental Illness;” Loggins, “Instagram ‘Sad Girls Club’
helps young women deal with depression;” Ross, “Elyse Fox: ‘I Was
Labeled As The Angry Black Woman.”
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199
121. Jacoby, “How Instagram’s ‘Sad Girls Club’ Is Busting the Stigma Around
Mental Illness.”
122. Sad Girls Club (@sadgirlsclub), “Sad Girls at @teenvogue summit ,”
Instagram post, June 2, 2018, accessed June 22, 2022, https://www.
instagram.com/p/Bjh4SMsHRna/.
123. Sad Girls Club (@sadgirlsclub), “Sad Girls Club is excited and honored to
represent mental health awareness and self acceptance in @olay’s
#FaceAnything campaign,” Instagram post, August 21, 2018, accessed
June 22, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/Bmv- KXSlLei/; Sad
Girls Club (@sadgirlsclub), “Founder @elyse.fox shares some tips about
what to do when social media becomes too overwhelming for @monki’s
‘All the feels,’” Instagram post, October 26, 2018, accessed June 22,
2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/BpaQD7oh0tm/.
124. Fox in Jacoby, “How Instagram’s ‘Sad Girls Club’ Is Busting the Stigma
Around Mental Illness.”
125. Alderton, The aesthetics of self-harm, 106.
126. Sad Girls Club (@sadgirlsclub), “Do you want to help a friend who’s
going through IT? Here are some ways you can help,” Instagram post,
June 6, 2017, accessed June 22, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/
BVAoI8- FjOB/; Sad Girls Club (@sadgirlsclub), “A HUGE reason why
SadGirlsClub was created was to remove the negative stigma behind dis-
cussing mental illnesses,” Instagram post, March 29, 2017, accessed June
22, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/BSOvDUvAymu/.
127. Blackman, “Affective politics, debility and hearing voices.”
128. Sad Girls Club (@sadgirlsclub), “Question: You see signs of mental strug-
gles on your friends Instagram… wyd?,” Instagram post, September 4,
2018, accessed June 22, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/
BnT3Zi5FaJS/.
129. Koman, “How the 23-Year-Old Meme Queens Behind @MyTherapistSays
Blew Up Instagram.”
130. Ibid; Lola Tash and Nicole Argiris (@mytherapistsays), “Yes I’m still
watching
Netix, don’t stop and make me question my decisions. I chose you
now be happy about it. (rp from @2trashybitches),” Instagram post,
February 1, 2016, accessed June 27, 2022, https://www.instagram.
com/p/BBOmF98HjNY/; Lola Tash and Nicole Argiris (@mytherapist-
says), “If it requires pants, I don’t want to go,” Instagram post, February
6, 2016, accessed June 27, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/
BBbqBGAnjAe/.
131. Mediakix.com, “How two friends created @mytherapistsays, a 2.4+ mil-
lion follower Instagram meme empire,” Blog post, last accessed March
27, 2020, website is no longer available.
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200
132. Lorenz, “Michael Bloomberg’s Campaign Suddenly Drops Memes
Everywhere.”
133. Kanai, “Girlfriendship and sameness;” Kanai, “The best friend, the boy-
friend, other girls, hot guys, and creeps;” Kanai, Gender and Relatability
in Digital Culture; Kanai, “On not taking the self seriously.”
134. Kanai, “On not taking the self seriously,” 60.
135. Lola Tash and Nicole Argiris (@mytherapistsays), “Forever always on the
verge of a Britney 2007 meltdown (via @tindervsreality),” Instagram
post, February 19, 2016, accessed June 27, 2022, https://www.insta-
gram.com/p/BB- kGwHnjOJ/.
136. Sieben, “Britney Spears’ 2007 Mental Health Crisis Is a 2017 Meme.”
137. Gill and Kanai, “Mediating Neoliberal Capitalism.”
138. Kanai, Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture.
139. At one point in my research, the My Therapist Says website contained
extensive information for potential advertisers. Including a “press” head-
ing that featured links to several articles about the account, an “advertise”-
section where companies could nd information on how to purchase
access to the My Therapist Says audience, boasting about “2 million
impressions per post,” “75K engagements per image” and “200K engage-
ments per video.” The website also featured an 8-page media kit that
outlined the case for working with the My Therapist Says brand, detailing
their demographic and their resume of brand partners. These pages are
no longer available on their website, which at the time of writing only
contains some basic information about Tash and Argiris and a webshop.
“My Therapist is … rebranding,” website, accessed June 27, 2022,
https://mytherapistsays.ca/.
140. Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “WE ARE ALL VERY
ANXIOUS.”
141. Ibid.
142. Ibid.
143. Haley Byam (@ghosted1996), “An old hardcore mood,” Instagram post,
https://www.instagram.com/p/BUq1z_1FVi9/, the post is no longer
available at this link because Haley’s account was suspended by Instagram
and since late 2021 she has a new one under the slightly different user-
name @ghosted_1996; Haley Byam (@ghosted1996), “Um this had a
typo so reposting lol I hate myself but Raise your hand if mental health-
care/pharma has actually drastically worsened your illness but you’re still
dependent on it,” Instagram post, https://www.instagram.com/p/
BVvCOzolI5i/, just as with the other post, this post is no longer available.
144. Haley Byam (@ghosted1996), “Anyone tried nuva ring for PMDD? Drop
ur experiences in the comments below,” Instagram post, just as with the
Byam’s other posts, this has since been deleted, https://www.instagram.
com/p/BmJ42ghFyYl/.
F. THELANDERSSON

201
145. Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “WE ARE ALL VERY
ANXIOUS.”
146. Ibid.
147. Haley Byam (@ghosted_1996), “someone please tell me what to do,”
Instagram post, December 8, 2021, accessed June 27, 2022, https://
www.instagram.com/p/CXO6K- TPJU6/?hl=en.
148. Kanai, “On not taking the self seriously,” 60.
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beach- read- 60068/.
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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
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permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copy-
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5 SOCIAL MEDIA SADNESS: SAD GIRL CULTURE AND RADICAL WAYS…

209
CHAPTER 6
Conclusion
In the preceding chapters I have traced how the Western media landscape
of the early twenty-rst century has gone from one focused on the positive
to one that has room for talk about sadness and mental distress. This hap-
pened either in a way that exemplied protable vulnerability—a market-
able 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 arti-
cles 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 some-
one else who is struggling, and the later ones instead assume that their
readers have rsthand experience of mental illness. The tone in their arti-
cles tended to take a lighthearted and distanced approach to issues of
mental health, ensuring a relatable coverage that touches on difcult top-
ics 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 ghting stigma. This outlet’s branding as
© The Author(s) 2023
F. Thelandersson, 21st Century Media and Female Mental Health,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16756-0_6

210
“woke” was reected 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 accom-
panied by the phone numbers to suicide prevention hotlines or linking to
other resources. Pieces in this publication also tended to provide substan-
tial context and information about the diagnoses and difculties 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 inter-
pretation of the dominating biomedical paradigm. In this sense Cosmo
exemplies the protable vulnerability of contemporary media culture,
where difcult subjects are shared in easily digestible ways as a means to
establish authenticity but ultimately feeds back into neoliberal condence
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 come-
back narratives that were once the prerogative of male celebrities now are
also available for women to adopt.1 Lovato’s repeated setbacks and confes-
sions 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 conrms that acknowledgments of mental distress are
available also to “spectacularized can-do” girls who were previously por-
trayed as always successful and well-adjusted.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 con-
tinuous 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
F. THELANDERSSON

211
health narratives are clear examples of protable 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 sing-
er’s 2018 overdose. In the venues and through channels about the stars,
fans nd each other and can get and provide support in difcult times.
In this chapter I also discuss what I term a postfeminist sadness, by
accounting briey 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 ve years later Gomez
says in an interview with Vogue that she wants girls to “feel allowed to fall
apart,” reecting a signicant shift in dominant media culture towards
female expressions of weakness.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 cul-
ture, 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 gures
(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 fol-
lowers, 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 protable 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 immedi-
ately 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.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
6 CONCLUSION

212
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 con-
dence, empowerment, shamelessness, and resilience.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 life-
styles idealised in cultural mythologies of powerful “can-do” girls.”6 But
in other instances female rage enters the mediated public sphere only to be
“simultaneously contained and disavowed.”7 And in yet another gura-
tion, 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.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 wom-
en’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 con-
tend 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 com-
pletely discursive (socially and linguistically constructed) nor xed neuro-
logical truths (biological facts of life that always look the same), but
emerge and take shape in a complex interplay between sociocultural dis-
courses 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
F. THELANDERSSON

213
in the nineteenth century.9 In the middle of the twentieth century, schizo-
phrenia was commonly used as a diagnosis for unruly female behavior.10
The latter half of the twentieth century was dominated by deinstitutional-
ization and the increased availability of psychopharmaceuticals. And as
Jonathan Michel Metzl has argued, the introduction of a biomedical para-
digm in psychiatry did not replace old psychoanalytic ideas about gender
with “objective” biological understandings of the psyche.11 Throughout
the development of psychopharmacology, the connection between femi-
ninity 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 indel-
ity.”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 tradi-
tions 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 “strug-
gles.” 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.13
At the start of the twenty-rst century, women’s media culture was
dominated by positive and upbeat messages about working hard to suc-
ceed in the workplace, so much so that women were congured as the
ideal neoliberal subjects who, by enough work on the self, could reach
almost innite levels of achievement.14 Antidepressant drugs like Prozac
were used by a high number of women, but they were not widely dis-
cussed 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 state-
ment 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 confes-
sions by celebrities from 2015 and onwards about living with various diag-
noses and traumas could in an optimistic reading be seen as “proof” that
6 CONCLUSION

214
the demands of late-stage capitalism and the precarity of life in neoliberal
states was nally being acknowledged as unsustainable. But many of these
narratives were quickly reabsorbed in the condence culture and rather
than destabilize neoliberal ideals they worked to afrm 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 prob-
lems, the protable vulnerability we see in celebrity health narratives and
the most mainstream mental health discourses reinforce it by celebrating
individualized answers to illness/difculty.
Through Demi Lovato’s health narrative, for example, we learn that
pain and struggle are part of ever yday life. But rather than pausing for too
long to dwell on what is hurting, one should work hard to overcome dif-
culties and show resilience. The sequence in their second tell-all docu-
mentary, 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 gura-
tion 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 excep-
tional 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 difculties are acknowledged
to show authenticity and build stronger connections with fans and follow-
ers, but they then tend to be congured within narratives of self-
optimization and improvement so that the overcoming of tragedy gives
added cadence to messages of resilience.
F. THELANDERSSON

215
If the increased attention given to mental illness and sadness was an
indirect response to a culture overtly focused on the positive, the way vul-
nerability is employed as a tool for protability 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 feel-
ing 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 market-
ing 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 nd 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 dis-
tance from a difcult experience (living with depression/anxiety/bipolar
6 CONCLUSION

216
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 nar-
ratives and function as nodes of support for those who are suffering. As
discussed in the fth 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.”15 Allison identies 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.”16 Allison calls
this “a vitalist politics that creates forms of connectedness that, quite liter-
ally, sustain people in their everyday lives.”17 The online spaces where vari-
ous 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 nishing this book in the summer of 2022, the world seems to
have been on re for a while. The COVID-19 pandemic is not yet over,
there is a war raging in Ukraine, ination 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 signicantly. 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.18
F. THELANDERSSON

217
What is clear is that media play a signicant role in how people under-
stand and take care of their mental wellbeing in this fast-changing world.
During the rst 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 difcult 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 prolif-
erated, and the relatable approach became a way to talk about difcult
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.19 Their memes employ the language of attachment theory
and polyvagal trauma therapy and clearly serve both a comedic and sup-
portive function. On the Instagram account of writer-activist Adrienne
Maree Brown supportive memes are mixed with poetry and calls to politi-
cal action.20 And Sonalee Rashatwar, who posts under the handle thefats-
extherapist, is only one of many mental health professionals who share
advice and support to their large group of followers.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 suf-
fering. 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.
notes
1. As I argued in the fourth chapter, the fact that Lovato came out as nonbi-
nary in 2021 and said they use the pronouns they/them does not take
away from the fact that the singer was a central gure in early twenty-rst-
century girl culture.
2. Projansky, Spectacular Girls.
6 CONCLUSION

218
3. Vogue.com, “Selena Gomez Gets Real About Anxiety.”
4. Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “WE ARE ALL VERY ANXIOUS.”
5. Banet-Weiser, Empowered; Dobson, Postfeminist Digital Cultures; Kanai,
“On not taking the self seriously;” Orgad and Gill, Condence Culture.
6. Dobson and Kanai, “From “can-do” girls to insecure and angry,” 1.
7. Orgad and Gill, “Safety valves for mediated female rage in the #MeToo
era,” 596.
8. Wood, “Fuck the patriarchy.”
9. Showalter, The female malady.
10. Appignanesi, Sad, mad and bad.
11. Metzl, Prozac on the couch.
12. Ibid, 72.
13. Ibid, 15.
14. Gill, “Postfeminist media culture;” Gill, “Culture and Subjectivity in
Neoliberal and Postfeminist Times;” McRobbie, The aftermath of femi-
nism; Ringrose and Walkerdine, “Regulating The Abject;” Scharff,
“Gender and neoliberalism.” See also Chap. 1 for a more elaborate discus-
sion of this.
15. Allison, “The Cool Brand, Affective Activism and Japanese Youth;” Allison,
Precarious Japan; Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “WE ARE ALL
VERY ANXIOUS.”
16. Allison, “The Cool Brand, Affective Activism and Japanese Youth,” 106.
17. Ibid, 106.
18. WHO. “COVID-19 Pandemic Triggers 25% Increase in Prevalence of
Anxiety and Depression Worldwide.”
19. Feldman (@softcore_trauma), ”Softcore_trauma,” Instagram prole,
accessed June 30, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/softcore_trauma/.
20. Brown (@adriennemareebrown), ”Adrienne Maree Brown,” Instagram
prole, accessed June 30, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/
adriennemareebrown/.
21. Sonalee (@thefatsextherapist), “The Fat Sex Therapist,” Instagram prole,
accessed June 30, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/
thefatsextherapist/.
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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
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F. THELANDERSSON

221
Index1
1 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.
A
Acedia, 167–169, 175, 192
Addiction, 119, 120, 124, 125, 128, 214
ADHD, 65
Affect
affective resonance, 161
feminist approaches to, 19–20
Ahmed, Sara, 19
Alderton, Zoe, 11, 133, 158, 159,
172, 174
Anna, O., 44, 45
Anorexia, 20, 38, 52–53, 106
Anxiety, 1, 2, 5–9, 12, 13, 19–22, 38,
45, 51, 52, 55, 61, 64, 65, 68,
70, 72, 73, 77, 79, 80, 83, 90,
91, 104–106, 111, 113, 119,
127–129, 132, 137, 138n5,
139n7, 160, 162, 163, 165–167,
184, 187–189, 191, 192, 209,
211–213, 215, 216
Appignanesi, Lisa, 33, 50, 54
Augustine, 42–44, 46, 49, 54
Authenticity, 8, 10, 12, 103, 108–111,
114, 117, 121, 125, 129, 135,
137, 175, 209, 210, 214
B
Banet-Weiser, Sarah, 123
Barnes, Mary, 49, 54
Berlant, Lauren, 19
Biopolitics, 15–17, 34
Bipolar disorder, 6, 8, 21, 55, 86, 104,
115, 120–122, 124, 126, 139n7,
144n139, 179, 214, 215
Black Lives Matter (BLM), 74, 78
Blackman, Lisa, 70–73, 123, 165,
167, 178, 186
Bordo, Susan, 52, 54
Breuer, Josef, 44–46
The Bride of Lammermoor, 37
Bulimia, 214
Butler, Judith, 18
Bynes, Amanda, 105, 169
© The Author(s) 2023
F. Thelandersson, 21st Century Media and Female Mental Health,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16756-0

222 INDEX
C
Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, 38, 39
Carey, Mariah, 85, 106
Celebrities, 2, 4–6, 8, 12, 13, 21, 22,
24n33, 41, 63, 74, 78, 82–86,
91, 103–137, 169, 172, 175,
209–211, 213–215, 217
Charcot, Jean-Martin, 39–45, 49
Chesler, Phyllis, 48
Condence culture, 18, 116, 124,
135, 160, 179, 210, 214
Cosmopolitan, 8, 12, 13, 20, 61–92,
106, 111, 179, 209–212
COVID-19, 5, 82, 83, 130, 216
Cvetkovich, Ann, 19, 167, 168
D
De Beauvoir, Simone, 47
Del Rey, Lana, 10, 11, 21, 23n27,
103, 131–135, 137, 157, 159,
169–172, 174, 175, 211, 212
Delevingne, Cara, 83, 84, 105
Depression, 1, 53, 61, 104,
160, 209
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM), 50, 51
Didi-Huberman, Georges, 40, 41
E
Eating disorder, 52–53, 65, 104, 113,
115, 116, 120, 124, 126
Eilish, Billie, 1, 134, 135, 172
F
Feeling rules, 19, 71, 160, 171
of neoliberalism, 19, 160, 188,
191, 211
Feminism, 11, 17, 18, 43–44, 53, 62,
71, 123, 133, 159, 168, 171,
172, 184
popular, 6, 17–18, 72, 123, 132,
133, 137, 175
Foucault, Michel, 15, 16, 34, 45
Franssen, Gaston, 108, 115, 118, 122
Freud, Sigmund, 39, 40, 44–48, 166
Friedan, Betty, 47
G
Gaga, Lady, 82, 103
Gilbert, Sandra, 38
Gill, Rosalind, 2–4, 8, 17–19, 62, 63,
68, 109, 114, 116, 121, 123,
124, 135, 140n47, 160, 171, 188
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 37
Girls
“can-do”, 3, 23n11, 112, 113, 117,
127–131, 175, 186, 210, 212
at-risk, 112
Gomez, Selena, 1, 8, 21, 103,
112–114, 127–135, 137,
144n139, 210, 211, 213
Governmentality, 15–17, 34
Greer, Germaine, 48
Gubar, Susan, 38
H
Harris, Anita, 112
Hilton, Paris, 104
Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 19, 71, 72,
93n42, 160
Holmes, Su, 105
Humor, 12, 67–69, 90, 93n28, 160,
166–167, 178, 179, 182, 186,
190, 191, 211, 215, 216
coping through, 166–167
Hysteria, 9, 20, 33, 39–46, 212
I
Illouz, Eva, 20, 122
Impasse, 160, 167–169, 183, 192

223 INDEX
Instagram, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 22,
55, 84, 107, 109, 125, 129–131,
157–160, 162, 167, 170, 172,
173, 175–192, 197n90, 211,
212, 215, 217
Institute for Precarious Consciousness,
7, 160, 189, 192, 211, 216
K
Kanai, Akane, 3, 12, 19, 68, 69, 160,
171, 179, 183, 187, 188
Kegan Gardiner, Judith, 53, 54
Kingsley Hall, 49
L
Lacan, Jacques, 48
Laing, R.D., 48, 49
Listicle, 2, 64–66, 68, 69, 77–79, 86,
90, 138n5, 210
Lohan, Lindsay, 105, 169
Lovato, Demi, 8, 78, 103, 210
Dancing with the Devil, 115,
126, 136
Simply Complicated, 115, 118–122,
136, 214
Stay Strong, 115–119, 121,
136, 211
Love, Courtney, 169
M
Madwoman, 35–38, 42, 45
Victorian, 9, 20, 33, 35–39
Magazines, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 13, 17,
20, 22, 61–92, 103, 104, 106,
112, 115, 127–130, 138n5,
157, 171, 174, 185, 186, 209,
210, 215
Markle, Meghan, 1, 7, 104
Marwick, Alice, 109
McRobbie, Angela, 3, 4, 8, 61, 62,
114, 135
Melancholia, 6, 8, 14, 167–169,
175, 192
Memes, 161, 167, 170, 176, 177,
179–188, 191, 192,
211, 215–217
anti-capitalist, 176, 183, 184
Metzl, Jonathan Michel, 51,
52, 54, 213
Millett, Kate, 47, 48
Mitchell, Juliet, 48
Morrison, Toni, 39
My Therapist Says, 8, 22, 159, 160,
187–188, 191, 200n139, 211
N
Negra, Diane, 2, 105
Neoliberalism, 2, 6, 15–19, 68, 120,
121, 137, 160, 165, 168, 171,
175, 188, 191, 211
Neurasthenia, 9, 20, 33, 37
O
Obsessive-compulsive-disorder
(OCD), 104
Ophelia, 37–39, 42
Orbach, Susie, 52
Orgad, Shani, 3, 4, 8, 18, 114, 116,
123, 124, 135, 160
Osaka, Naomi, 104, 139n6
P
Pinel, Philippe, 39
Plath, Sylvia, 47, 144n137
Postfeminism, 2, 17–18, 62, 120, 121,
137, 171
Projansky, Sarah, 6, 9, 113, 141n60
Prozac, 51, 53, 54, 213

224 INDEX
Psychic life
of neoliberalism, 2, 121, 137
of postfeminism, 18, 62
of power, 18
Psychoanalysis, 44–49, 51, 169
Psychopharmaceuticals,
49–55, 67, 213
Psychotropic drugs, 9, 51, 55, 163,
178, 213
PTSD, 82, 103
R
Relatability, 20, 22, 61–92, 111, 114,
160, 179, 183, 187, 188, 191,
192, 211, 215–216
relatable self, 66, 68, 90, 160
Revolution, French, 34
Rose, Nikolas, 16, 17
S
Sad girl(s)
club, 22
Instagram, 22, 175–185, 187, 191,
192, 211
theory, 11, 22, 157, 170–175, 191,
193n5, 196n70
Tumblr, 22, 160–170, 178,
183, 193n11
y qué, 8, 159
Salpêtrière, 39–46
Scharff, Christina, 2, 18, 121
Schizophrenia, 9, 20, 33, 46–49, 213
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 9, 19, 24n34
Self-harm, 78–80, 87, 104, 115,
131, 158
Showalter, Elaine, 33, 35–37,
40–46, 49
Snow, Brittany, 106
Spears, Britney, 105, 107, 169, 188
#FreeBritney movement, 107
Spitzer, Robert, 50
Spotify, 1, 130, 131
T
Tasker, Yvonne, 2
Teen Vogue, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 20, 21,
55, 61–92, 103, 106, 130, 185,
209, 210, 215
Therapy
cognitive behavioral, 51
dialectical behavior, 79, 128
psychodynamic, 50
Tumblr, 7, 8, 11, 22, 68, 106, 131,
157–159, 161–170, 173, 175,
176, 178, 186, 189–192,
211, 212
Twitter, 83, 109, 124–126, 157, 162,
182, 184, 211, 215
V
Vulnerability, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 37, 46,
68, 71, 91, 111, 112, 116, 118,
124, 126, 135–137, 160, 179,
188, 191, 209, 211, 215
protable, 2, 4, 10, 12, 21, 22, 55,
91, 108, 114, 137, 160, 179,
187, 210, 214
W
Wilson, Elizabeth A., 43, 44, 54
Winehouse, Amy, 105, 132, 169
Wollen, Audrey, 8, 11, 157, 159, 160,
170–176, 191, 211, 212
Wurtzel, Elizabeth, 53, 54
Y
YouTube, 70, 72, 90, 111, 112, 118,
119, 126, 131