Mood Disorder - by Holly Avella (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Mental health technology companies have become some of social media's biggest advertisers and a prime source of endorsement deals with 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 branded psychiatric identities and calibrate the mood of contemporary mental health discourse and practice. 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 mental health media effects and misinformation, Avella honors the coping functions of therapy tech while probing the moody histories of diagnostic mental health, from hysteria photos to the aestheticized meds delivered to your door. Ultimately, this book asks readers to consider if more equitable and just forms of care are possible in these spaces.

From the Back Cover

"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, author of Birth, School, Work, Death: UX and the Struggle Against Lifecycle Optimization "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 essential 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, Goldsmiths, University of London

About the Author

Holly Avella is Assistant Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.