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Mental health technology companies are some of social media’s biggest advertisers, as well as a prime source of endorsement deals for influencers—many of whom are also professional therapists. In Mood Disorder, Holly Avella explores how digital therapeutic technologies, including popular mood-tracking apps and algorithmic social media, work to construct psychiatric identities and calibrate mental health discourse including moods toward branded disorders. Through more than five years of mixed-method, qualitative research, Avella investigates what happens when media platforms are given diagnostic authority. Moving beyond critiques of the effects of mental health media and misinformation, she honors the coping functions of therapy tech while probing the histories of diagnostic mental health, from hysteria photos to aestheticized meds delivered to your door. This book asks readers to consider whether more equitable and just forms of care are possible.
Holly Avella is Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Data Analytics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
“Refusing to feed the moral panic, Mood Disorder asks hard questions about why social media has been granted diagnostic authority as the primary mediator of mental health. Revealing how platforms merely echo the already flimsy biomedical categories shaped by Big Pharma, Holly Avella insists the real crisis lies in the economic, biological, and psychological thick of it. An essential reckoning.”—Tony D. Sampson, coeditor of Affect and Social Media: Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion
"Mood Disorder provides an insightful analysis of digital mental health. Avella deftly moves between the biomedical, psychiatric, spiritual, and ritual ways that new technologies are creating and disciplining a mood. This book is vital for anyone looking to understand mental health—in all its complexity—in a digital age."—Adrienne Evans, coauthor of Digital Feeling
"This book captures developments in how mental health is made meaningful online, who benefits, and directions for more affirmative possibilities. Avella offers a fascinating and insightful contribution to the emerging field of digital affect."—Sarah Riley, coauthor of Postfeminism and Health: Critical Psychology and Media Perspectives
"From the Uberization of therapy apps to ‘TikTok diagnosed me,’ Holly Avella persuasively unpicks the coordinates of mental health in a rapidly changing context shaped by platforms, brands, and vibes. A dazzling analysis of mental health and its entanglement with biomedical discourse, consumer culture, and tech."—Rosalind Gill, Professor of Inequalities in Media, Culture, and Creative Industries, Goldsmiths, University of London