The 'mental health!' industry

A viral TikTok video illuminates the issues plaguing the mental health conversation. Plus: ketamine's woo-woo makeover, Peloton rebrand, wellness travel priorities, and more.

May 24, 2023

Latest: Ketamine is now being researched as a treatment for depression. But what's at stake when it's marketed as wellness? I shared my thoughts with Harper’s Bazaar on the goopification of a drug that still requires more research into long-term benefits and potential side effects.

“If it’s built like a spa, customers might view it as a spa instead of what it actually is, which is a health intervention … By putting such a treatment in a more entertaining or soothing setting, you run the risk of distorting its purpose and effects.”
Read: Ketamine's Woo-Woo Rebrand

The ‘mental health!’ industry

A few days ago, this TikTok video went viral: A college student clad in matching athleisurewear is going about her day. She walks around her campus. She exercises. She takes a few punches at the local boxing ring. As upbeat music plays, she narrates what seems like the average young adult life—but she also notes that life has thrown countless obstacles at her this year, “from a school shooting to having no idea what life will look like after college.”

The school shooting she so briefly mentions was the murder of three Michigan State University students this past February.

Before the viewer even has a chance to react to this bombshell casually thrown into the mix, she proclaims, “In support of Mental Health Awareness Month, I’m partnering with Bioré Skincare to strip away the stigma of anxiety,” all while smiling through the product placement. The influencer professes she wants others to “get it all out,” a reference, one must assume, to both blackheads and trauma.

Critics lambasted the video which seemed in poor taste, essentially monetizing a mass shooting. Some wondered if the video was satire, while others noted it felt more dystopian and cringe than anything that might authentically resonate with young audiences. A few asked if gun violence survivors were the hot new sought-after influencers. “This is dark,” one tweeted, “but not as dark as the blackheads this new Biore pore strip removed from my T-zone!

I saw it as yet another instance of exploiting trauma, a term increasingly devalued and used to reference everything from insults to securing Taylor Swift concert tickets. (If everything is trauma, then nothing is trauma.) It’s a term mentioned so much that it’s become commodified.

Trauma has acquired a certain kind of cultural clout, and one that’s certainly propelled past other concepts (like resilience). Of course, it’s good that society better addresses difficult, stigmatized issues often ignored in the past. But at times, it seems our culture increasingly harps on hardship, victimhood, and pain. When does it potentially go too far?

Or perhaps the better question is: how are industries butchering what should be healthy conversations about mental health?

This comes at the peak of the mental health industry: apps, partnerships, branding, and awareness campaigns flooding our feeds. Fashion labels like Museum of Peace & Quiet sell $160 “mental wellness” sweatpants. Retailers such as Boohoo launched #BeKindtoyourmind campaign stressing body image confidence, while still retaining sexy thin models to populate their sites. Celebs used to score brownie points by supporting meditation or wellness platforms, but now they’re pushed to confess intimate trauma stories and hawk beauty lines, all, seemingly in the name of psychological benefits.

And social media platforms, once criticized for how poor moderation efforts negatively impact youth, launch laughably minimal efforts. TikTok added a mental health awareness hub—whoop-dee-do!

What irritates me is the lack of critical thinking when we’re presented with these lauded endeavors, not to mention, negligible inquiries. Selena Gomez’s VC-backed mental health startup Wondermind wants to “democratize and destigmatize mental health.” The actress’ pledge made quite the media splash, with big-name outlets applauding her advocacy efforts. But to this day, no one can precisely explain what Wondermind concretely intends to do. Nearly every article just dances around it, instead focusing on the fact that Americans feel awfully lousy and lonely. What is her plan? Are these efforts evidence-based? Or is it just more awareness efforts? How much more awareness do we need (and emblazoned across our outfits)?

On the flip side, are there drawbacks to too much awareness? On the

Meghan Daum

podcast The Unspeakable (ep: “Does Your Kid Really Need Therapy?”), psychotherapist Stella O’Malley discusses how suicide prevention efforts sometimes have the opposite effect: suicide and self-harm are spoken about so much in schools, online, and in TV shows—“we’ve spread it like confetti,” as she puts it—that the likelihood of teen suicidal ideation is much higher. “We’ve made a real mess of speaking about mental health,” says O’Malley.

Here’s an even bigger question: What do you mean by mental health? How do you define it? How do you measure it? And then from there, how do you manage it?

For every brand and celeb talking ad nauseam about this issue, very few seem able to explain it–or, as in the case of Bioré, they explain it quite poorly. On the off chance you do get someone to attempt an explanation, you generally get something like “self-care” (which, as I detailed in my LA Times piece, generally connotes a more consumerist and individualist interpretation, namely, bubble baths and yoga.). If not that, then it’s therapy, full stop.

Therapy can be great although it is not the panacea to all woes, especially since we’re dealing with societal issues like loneliness and lack of communal support. (Or, for youth besieged by anxiety, increasing evidence also points to a lack of childhood independence.) Suggesting everyone snag a therapist is not the sole answer. So I was glad to see that the New York Times published two pieces this month imploring readers to think a bit more critically about the limits of counseling.

In “Does Therapy Really Work?”, Susan Dominus argues that since the pandemic, therapy has become a staple of self-care, “almost like a gym membership.” While a vast body of research attests to therapy’s usefulness, there is the risk of overpromising benefits. Not to mention, a debate still exists as to the extent of therapy’s effectiveness.

As is true of much research, studies with less positive or striking results often go unpublished, so the body of scholarly work on therapy may show inflated effects. And researchers who look at different studies or choose different methods of data analysis have generated more conservative findings.

A week earlier, the Times posed a more philosophical question: How Miserable Are We Supposed to Be? In this op-ed, clinical psychologist Huw Green highlighted tough questions when addressing (or medicating) the human condition: What is the goal of mental health treatment? Is it to be happy? What is happiness, and how do you measure it? And how do we ensure we don’t pathologize what are presumably ordinary, albeit challenging, aspects of life?

Essentially, we don’t want too much misery and when pain feels unbearable or distorted, we outsource the decision to experts. But, what is considered abnormal is a power that still resides, Green argues, with the general public rather than specialists. A community decides what is and what isn’t a mental disorder:

If you start behaving in ways that are uninterpretable by your community, you might find yourself in front of a psychiatrist. The extent to which we are mentally unhealthy is a function of what starts to seem unhealthy in the context of people who know us well and are trying to get along with us.

I bring up these two articles because they hint at just a slice of a larger conversation we’re not having; there’s been a flattening of discussions surrounding mental health, in part due to surface-level Insta-therapy accounts and “self-care” culture, both of which fail to grapple with the complexity of the issue. More and more Americans turn to Instagram and TikTok for not just a release, but also guidance as to what mental health entails. And nearly 75% of Gen-Zers support mental health messaging in their ads, according to consumer insights firm GWI. So when every brand, influencer, and corporate entity tries to stick their flag in their ground to claim a part of the conversation, it sorta matters because it’s subtly distorting what all this means—and what we actually need.

There is no easy answer, but if you were to take some of these campaigns at face value, you’d assume it’s as simple as downloading an app or “committing” to a meditation routine, versus taking a closer look at larger societal/systemic issues that require change. But addressing those tougher issues—and bigger questions—wouldn’t fit into a blackhead-clearing skincare commercial.

—Rina Raphael, author of The Gospel of Wellness

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News & Trends:

People too tired to lead healthier lifestyles, survey finds: “When asked what was stopping them from eating more healthily and exercising more often, 29% of men and 40% of women cited ‘feeling too tired.’” Other common reasons given included the cost of food (30%), lack of time (26%) and work/life balance (25%). (Guardian)

Peloton rebrand? The struggling bike maker “reintroduces itself” with an emphasis on app content. (Peloton)

FTC warns almost 700 companies they could face penalties if they can’t back up product claims: All your faves made the list—Elysium! Goop! Herbalife! Lemme! (FTC)

Related: My WSJ piece on Kourtney Kardashian’s Lemme supplement brand Lemme: WSJ: More hype than health?

A new modern sauna: Alexis Ohanian teases a luxe, minimalist Finnish sauna called Ancient Ritual. (Ancient Ritual via LinkedIn)

Bumble snaps up relationship wellness app Official: Relationship-strengthening apps are becoming more popular and this one focuses on mood check-ins and date planning. (FastCo)

Ashwagandha under scrutiny: Ashwagandha reportedly may be banned in Finland, Sweden and further EU member states if scientific concerns are not dispelled. (NutraIngredients)

Michelle Obama’s new “wellness” drinks wouldn’t qualify for her own healthy school meals initiative: The Plezi beverages have been described as “standard-industry, ultra-processed products not to be promoted to kids.” (Bloomberg)

Nearly 80% of consumers say wellness is a priority when they travel: Simple pleasures top the list of priorities, like getting fresh air (versus being pampered with a massage). (Morning Consult)

CDC sets a minimum ventilation target in buildings: The agency set an aim for at least five air changes each hour and upgrades to MERV-13 filters. (CDC)

Dermalogica is using ChatGPT for education and upskilling: The skincare brand launched a #chatgpt version of its skin-care treatment manual used to train skincare experts. (Glossy)

Did scientists accidentally invent an anti-addiction drug? People taking Ozempic for weight loss say they have also stopped drinking, smoking, shopping, and even nail biting. (The Atlantic)

Hulk Hogan unveils new wellness brand: It’s every celeb now, no? Anyway, it will include functional mushrooms, CBD, and THC. (Yahoo!)

Healthier sugar brand DuoxMatok (which I previously profiled here) secures $30M in Series C funding: Its technology reduces the amount of sugar in foods by between 30% and 50%. (TechCrunch)

Gen Z prefers more positive, “wholesome” content: They’ll take that over the “satirical millennial memes of the early 2010s that were coated with dark humor and doused in irony.” (NYT)

Fertility app shared sensitive data, FTC reports: Ovulation tracking app Premom allegedly shared health info with Google and marketing firms since 2018. (TechCrunch)

Deeper Dives

‘Where to Meet People’ Internet Searches Spike
Google searches for “how to make friends,” “where to make friends,” and “where to meet people” had reached an all-time high. (Bloomberg)

Beware a Culture of Busyness
Research suggests that our days are becoming increasingly busier: references to “crazy schedules” have risen dramatically since the 1960s and the percentage of employed Americans reporting that they “never had enough time” rose from 70% in 2011 to 80% in 2018. “Put simply, busyness has become a status symbol,” writes Adam Waytz. (HBR)

In Finland, We Make Each Schoolchild a Scientist
"Society must pay at least as much attention to children’s minds as to social media algorithms." (Issues in Science and Technology)

The Reason People Listen to Sad Songs
If we don’t enjoy being sad, then why do we enjoy sad music? Philosophers and psychologists suggest a few theories. (NYT)

What to Read to Come to Terms With Death
Definitely not beach read material, but these seven titles aim to help individuals “accept our limitations and live full lives.” (The Atlantic)