Young adults, learning and therapy practices in (post-)digital cultures

The COVID-19 pandemic reinvigorated long-standing calls from Australian health practitioners and advocates to improve psychotherapy access and mental health support through digital technologies. Yet, at the same time, we also saw renewed anxieties about social media and mental health. Social media content was positioned to abate the loneliness of mental health challenges and reduce stigma towards help-seeking, but was also critiqued for convincing young adults to employ psychological or psychopathological framing to seemingly everyday encounters. Here, the pedagogical role of social media became framed as a problem; it complicated knowledge, expertise, “truth” and authenticity related to mental health, therapy and wellbeing.

To better understand these relationships between therapy culture, mental health and social media, I critically examine how young adults engage with psychotherapy and therapy-related content on social media. I discuss a digital ethnography project studying the experiences of Australian young adults as well as data from digital media platforms and websites. Drawing on research related to theories of therapy as a social practice (Dreier, 2015), therapy culture and assemblages (Salmenniemi et al., 2019), and temporality in social learning (Sharma, 2014), I explore how therapeutic insight and learning emerge through (post-)digital cultures and platform practices. 

This project has implications for how we might — or might not — intervene in public discussions about social media as a “contagion” that teaches people to psycho(patho)logise their everyday lives, and how we might better critically interrogate the complexity and diversity of therapy and mental health within digital cultures. 

Bio

Dr Natalie Ann Hendry is a Senior Lecturer in Youth Wellbeing with the Youth Research Collective, Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research explores the relationships between health, digital media and education, with a particular focus on youth mental health, critical wellbeing studies and health education.