21st Century Media and Female Mental Health

Front matter

~ 9 21st Century Media and

Female Mental Health

Profitable Vulnerability and Sad Girl Culture

Introduction

Sadness and mental health awareness seem to be everywhere in the popular 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 publicized 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.!

The presence of sadness and mental illness awareness in mainstream public culture is a fairly recent phenomenon. Several scholars have defined the media landscape of the early twenty-first century as focused on happiness, creating a culture that privileges the positive and energetic while dismissing pain, injury, and failure.* 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 resilient, to be strong and sexy and cool and laid-back ... We also need to feel allowed to fall apart.”* 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 flexibility 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 1 F. Thelandersson, 21st Century Media and Female Mental Health, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16756-0_1 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.* Scripted characters with various psychic ailments pop up across the TV and movie landscape. On social media platforms young people are self-identifying with the moniker “sad girl,” inhabiting a position 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.°

How did the positive media landscape of the early 2000s turn into one that frequently addresses mental illness and trauma? 21” Century Media and Female Mental Health: Profitable 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 illness against a backdrop of a neoliberal and postfeminist culture that privileges individualism and personal choice, placing the responsibility for happiness and wellbeing solely on the individual.” I look at these contemporary iterations of mental illness specifically in relation to gender, following thinkers who define women as ideal neoliberal subjects. 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 neoliberalism and postfeminism, paying attention to how contemporary media culture focuses increasingly on the psychological, calling on subjects to work on not only their bodies and careers but also on their moods and attitudes.” The feelings that are privileged here tend to be positive ones:

confidence, empowerment, shamelessness, and resilience.!° Attention has also been given to the appearance of negative affects in this otherwise positive emotional landscape. Examples of this include Amy Shields Dobson and Akane Kanai’s study of affective dissonances in post-recessional television 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.'! These analyses present a complicated affective landscape. The presence of affective dissonances may be read as a problematization of the “accessibility and appeal of highly individualist career-oriented lifestyles idealised in cultural mythologies of powerful “can-do” girls.” !?? But in other instances female rage enters the mediated public sphere only to be “simultaneously contained and disavowed.”'* And in yet another figuration, the repeated use of “fuck” might signal an irreverent feminist rage that rejects respectability politics along the lines of gender, race, class, and sexuality, in an ultimately hopeful way.'* Rage in particular appeared as a powerful affect from which to build feminist politics after the 2016 election of Donald Trump.) 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 fighting as well as clarity in what needs to be changed.!°

Orgad and Gill have brilliantly described how the imperative to confidence for women within twenty-first-century media culture often works to dismantle feminist messages of their structural critique and place the solution to social injustice on the individual.'” By working on their confidence 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.'* But rather than challenge the confidence cult, this vulnerability works to reinforce it, where brands often introduce insecurity only to replace it with “defiant individualism.” 1°

Angela McRobbie also identifies this tendency to allow weakness in contemporary media culture, but she defines it as the “imperfect” and places it within a triangulation of affects expressed as the “perfect—imperfect—resilience.””° Here the perfect encourages women to succeed meritocratically 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 severely limited parameters and quickly followed by a resilience that “springs into existence as a ‘bounce-back’ mechanism.”7!

My book takes off from these previous theoretizations and looks at what I call the “turn to sadness” in twenty-first-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 “profitable vulnerability” that allows for market-friendly iterations of weakness that fit within the otherwise largely positive affective register of mainstream media culture. But in addition to this profitable 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, healing, 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 “define 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.”’? 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 fixture of the media landscape, with various outlets aimed at specific 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-first century and the rise of digital media, however, women’s magazines have struggled with declining revenues as advertisers and readers move to free online platforms.” The traditional magazines still hold the role of advice givers but celebrities, influencers, and peer networks on social media have also stepped into that role and now function as similar guiding lights. 21” 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 understand these various media sites as actively defining 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 definite truths about the culture of various social media platforms, rather I hope to provide a snapshot of what the conversations around mental health looked like during the 2010s on the specific platforms 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 define the contemporary moment as the period from 2008 and onward, with an understanding that the cultural and social landscape in the West was significantly affected by the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent bank bailouts and austerity measures. The financial recession can be read as the starting point for the current 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 manageable. 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 example, started after I had concluded my first 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 pandemic 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.

Guiding Questions

21” Century Media and Female Mental Health examines the contemporary structure of feeling that produces these increased representations of mental illness.” I ask how female subjects are hailed as mentally ill in various 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 diagnoses, 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 field of feminist media studies by studying the entanglement of emotions and popular feminism.

The key questions guiding me fall into two categories, first a set of questions concerning the gendered effects of neoliberalism regarding health:

What do the contemporary conversations around mental health look like in feminine/female dominated media spaces? What definitions 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 infinitely capable neoliberal subject when she acknowledges 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 definitions 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 interrogating how meanings are produced around issues of mental health. But I am also following scholars like Sarah Projansky, who “draws on a feminist media studies methodology in pursuit of optimistic anti-racist queer readings” of representations of girlhood.” 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 bodies’ 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.” But the online discourse 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.’ Teen Vogue also publishes pieces about the connection between mental health and structural inequalities regularly.”

It is particularly within the online spaces that I have found what resembles 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 Consciousnesss notion of a “precarity-focused consciousness raising” to move out from under the debilitating grip of anxiety, which they define as the dominant affect of the contemporary moment.*”

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 automatically 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 living 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 mental health causes and revealed some personal struggle to appear authentic and relatable (a belief expressed by various pundits at the time). This analysis 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.*! Such is the complexity of mental health 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 confidence and resilience, are compelling.* I follow their understandings and add primarily two elements: 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 acknowledges the more spacious ways of feeling bad that the increased conversations 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 Lovato** and Selena Gomez); and socially mediated expressions of depression, anxiety, and general sadness online (sad girls on Tumblr and Instagram, as well as the specific cases of Audrey Wollen, Sad Girls Y Qué, Sad Girls Club, and My Therapist Says). In my analysis, I have looked for specific mentions of depression, anxiety, and diagnoses like bipolar disorder, 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 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.** For Sedgwick, critical theory has for too long been invested in a “hermeneutics of suspicion” which analyzes the world in a paranoid way that always aims to uncover a negative or damaging truth.*® The problem with paranoid reading 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.*° A reparative position involves a “seeking of pleasure” and an openness to optimistic readings of a text or situation.*” In relation to contemporary mental health discourses, this means looking for potentially subversive or reparative aspects in portrayals 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.** In culture, the sad and mad woman has appeared as various popular figures: 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 lineage of these figures since the early modern period up until today. Historically, women’s sad experiences have been classified as pathologies leading to institutionalization and confinement. 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 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.*’ In this framework, all ties between health and structures of inequality are severed, and any attempts at politicizing widespread ill health are thwarted. 21° 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

10 EF. THELANDERSSON plenty of examples of a profitable 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 explicitly in Teen Vogue and among the sad girls on Instagram.

One of the arguments I make in this book is that the figure of the sad girl emerged as an indirect response to a media culture that required women in particular to be strong, empowered, and confident. The first 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.*? 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.“ 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. 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 constrained to the relatively superficial, glitter-sprayed longings of a Ke$ha rager: ‘We’re taking control/We’ve got what we want/We do what you don’t.”

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 find her troubling; she

1 INTRODUCTION ll embodies the worst part of being a girl.”** 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-field 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.**

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.”*° 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.*” For Wollen, women sharing photographs of themselves crying or otherwise publicly displaying their sadness should not be seen as expressions of weakness, but should instead be interpreted 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 originators 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.”** She locates this aesthetic as especially connected to the social media platform Tumblr and the “Tumblr Teen Girl Aesthetic” which is “both powerfully emotive and deeply ironic.”*? 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).°°

21” 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 among the top charts,°! my research shows that there was an increase in magazine coverage of depression /anxiety and celebrity confessions of living with mental illness from 2015 and onwards. I am not arguing that there was a straight line of causation or influence from Internet subculture to the mainstream, rather I want to call attention to a general turn to sadness 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 difficult subjects but do so with self-deprecating humor that serves to defuse the seriousness of the problems.” These representations are found largely in Cosmopolitan’s coverage of mental illness, among celebrities and microcelebrities, 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 “profitable vulnerability” that serves to show acceptance and tolerance of weakness while keeping a distance /remaining unthreatening. This vulnerability becomes profitable in that it strengthens the authenticity 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 influencer culture. Traditional celebrities 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 intimate connections with followers. 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 outlets that provide advice and where women have traditionally turned to for support, like magazines, largely reach audiences via social media feeds that are also filled with content from celebrities, influencers, and peers. In this way the various media spaces blend into each other and all function as nodes of support.

But alongside examples of profitable 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 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 ** This kind of sad girl culture offers more spacious ways of feeling bad that include both a systemic critique and direct support.

A note on terminology and the contextual specifications of the book is appropriate here. First, I largely use mental health and mental illness interchangeably 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 reflection 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 specific diagnoses. There is a slippage here, then, but it is largely influenced by a slippage present in the popular discourses examined, where definitions of what is exactly entailed by “depression” and “anxiety” are often absent. This lack of clear definitions 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 interesting insights into how the psyche is conceived of in the contemporary world, such an effort is far beyond the scope of this book.