From bleak nihilistic memes to mental health influencers

I hear you. I know we don’t rate influencers. I know we have big feelings about them. But if we’re going to have them anyway, well, better the content we consume is designed to keep us afloat than convince us we need appetite-suppressing lollipops.

Don’t worry about my therapist – @TherapyJeff isn’t about to steal her job. Reels and listicles and rapid-fire tips for cutting off your malignant ex to the tune of a viral soundbite won’t be on the other end of the phone when I hit crisis point, and consuming this content might even be actively unhealthy. There’s an article waiting to be written about toxic positivity, the lure of self-diagnoses, the glorification of disorders and medical conditions, and all the ways we can’t trust something as malleable and fickle as social media to fix what’s broken deep inside us.

It’s difficult, though, to resist the appeal of ring-lit, bite-sized, crowdsourced therapy for the cost of targeted ads you were probably going to see anyway, when the alternative is prohibitively expensive, feels like emotional torture and is almost never funny. I don’t have a hot take or a quippy solution for it: we just need better access to healthcare.

Meanwhile, in the gap between sessions and while we wait for Medicare to greenlight another four, it’s pretty nice to hang out with @TherapyJeff. My friends agree that it’s pretty nice to no longer be drip-fed existential dread in the group chat, too.