Healing the Depressed Self: A Study of Social Media Therapy

Abstract: Since 2019, therapy content from both mental health professionals and social media users has proliferated on both TikTok and Instagram, a phenomenon some have called Tiktok and Instagram therapy. This study explores two different facets of social media therapy. It explores how individuals with a history of depression engage with these accounts in order to cope with their condition. It also explores the content about depression this study's participants consume in the process, which knowledges about depression are privileged and which remain obscured. Based on qualitative content analyses of in-depth semi-structured interviews and collected social media posts from Instagram and Tiktok, this thesis adopts Foucault's theoretical approaches to Technologies of the Self and Power/Knowledge to reveal the complexities of social media therapy in the context of neoliberal mental healthcare and the dominance of psychiatric and psychological knowledge about depression. The findings show that social media therapy is a valuable tool for this study's participants through the careful curation of their social media therapy content and, thus, allowing them to gain better (self-)knowledge, tools for self-care and a sense of community to better cope with depression. However, participants' practices reveal a tension between the notions of agency and neoliberal imperatives of self-management operating simultaneously within the current mental healthcare context. The findings further show that social media therapy reinforces the stronghold of the medical and psychological sciences on conceptions of depression and reproduces neoliberal imperatives of self-responsibility and individualization, disregarding the social and structural determinants of depression. This study thus concludes that while social media therapy is a site of contradictions, its appeal and helpfulness in the current neoliberal mental healthcare context cannot be denied. Nevertheless, there is a need to bring more awareness to social and structural conditions leading to depression.