Everyday anxieties: young women, mental illness and social media practices of visibility and connection
Creators: name: HENDRY, Natalie
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 420313
subject: Mental health services
classificationCode: 440505
subject: Intersectional studies
classificationCode: 470102
subject: Communication technology and digital media studies

description: Stories about young women's use of social media and risk in Australia are especially volatile and misunderstood, particularly when mental illness is involved. Regardless of the reality of young women's social media use, their practices are framed by media panics that focus on <i>distress</i> or <i>contagion</i>. Social media campaigns promote visibility and connection of young women experiencing mental illness, where it is assumed that connection ameliorates anxiety and that sharing "truthful” - yet censored - expressions facilitates recovery. Young women are encouraged to be <i>invisible</i> and <i>visible</i>, to <i>connect</i> and <i>disconnect</i>, even as spectacular perspectives erase the potential for diverse ways to understand their practices.
This thesis focuses on four young women's stories about social media in and around their experiences of anxiety and mental illness. It explores questions that draw from practice theories - particularly affective practices - and theoretical approaches to visibility that reorient this thesis from the <i>spectacular</i> towards the <i>quotidian</i>. I draw upon a series of paradoxes such as visibility and invisibility, authenticity and inauthenticity, and connection and disconnection, to examine: What are the everyday social media practices of young women aged 14 to 17 years who are engaged with a youth mental health service? What influences these practices - including the technological and social affordances of social media? How do their practices relate to their discursive and affective experiences of mental illness? How do these practices afford intimacy, sociality and connection for these young women and what are the implications of this for their experiences of mental illness?
I present an in-depth case study of the lives of four young women - Claudia, Padawan, Daisy and Beatrix - each engaged with a youth mental health service in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. These case studies include image collections, social media platform analyses, and multiple, semi-structured and unstructured interviews conducted between June 2015 and January 2016. The research design is supported by a pilot study interviewing mental health practitioners and advocates.
This thesis illustrates that attention towards visibility for these young women is less about disclosing mental illness. Rather, they express anxiety about potential vulnerability, judgement and embarrassment from peers. Visibility emerges as how these young women imagine, perceive or experience how others "see" them, and, in turn, how they negotiate, inhibit or transform this visibility by controlling and curating it as an ongoing, quotidian process. At the same time, as connection and co-presence necessarily requires emotional work, restricting or managing visibility becomes important for them to escape conversation and critique, or to mediate peer demands and expectations of sociality.
They each negotiate connection and intimacy within the constraints and opportunities of different social contexts and platform affordances. This includes affective practices that afford relief from anxiety and emotional work to instead establish <i>affective </i>authenticity and emotional recognition through lurking, scrolling, humour, and image curation. Concurrently, these affective practices afford intimacy and "community" . By connecting at a distance, or connecting with images and platforms, their practices afford communities of feeling that provide affective authenticity and relief from distress and are potentially therapeutic.
This thesis has important implications for mental health practitioners and health and education policy and programming. The participants' media practices highlight the inadequacy of current paradigms that inform prevention and intervention initiatives in youth mental health. It is not only a theoretical exploration of how we might rethink young women's media practices but also it provides new frameworks for understanding their complex everyday emotional, visual, and social media landscape.