Mood, media, and mental health: a study of therapeutic mood mediating technologies
Creators: name: Avella, Holly
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2024

description: This dissertation shows 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.This mixed-methods qualitative study questions what happens when media platforms are afforded diagnostic gazes, and if these technologies collapse the already marketized mood that is tracked in work and retail spaces into the mood that is implicated in good or poor mental health. A critical psychology and media studies orientation examines today’s hyper-mediated mental health consumer as politically and (pop) culturally situated.Therapeutic mood tracking technologies across media forms are re-shaping the ways we conceive of and experience mental health and mental health care in ways that largely align with political-economic and platform logics. While some tech startups exploit a mental health crisis, the technology cannot critiqued without critically addressing the sociocultural and historical conditions that underpin contemporary notions of mood and mental health. Common frameworks like “misinformation” in digital diagnostic cultures (such as those that result in self-diagnosis) are inadequate and misleading.The project contributes the analytical framework of Therapeutic Mood (Mediating) Technology (TMT). TMT enrolls mood and affect as technical and discursive objects to be manipulated toward various ends, conflates modes of care with technological and economic models, and shapes mental health subjectivities. In the work chapters, this analysis highlights the collapse of conceptions of both mood and mental health into contemporary workplace and economic imperatives. Here, moods and affects are shown to be used socially in order to reconfigure workplace organization. Moody women’s apps are found to refute while reifying pathologized understandings of feminine mood swings, mental health, and their underlying assumptions. As digital mood tracking technologies, they serve an ongoing project of harnessing feminized emotionality while delimiting acceptable parameters and expressions of mood, mental health, and of gender. In the social media realm, TikTok users were found to imbue an ostensibly mood-reading algorithm with a clinical gaze, capable of accessing users’ subconscious selves and diagnosing them with a mood-related mental health disorder. TMT is often bolstered by a particular sensibility that runs through mood tracking and communication technologies historically–one that sees them as containing a compelling mixture of scientific and spiritual elements.This draws out important elements in the conception, implementation, and adoption of such technologies. All in all, the buy-in of these mood mediating technologies itself can be viewed as serving a therapeutic function—a threat response and a resolution of tensions inherent in power’s particular operations on our contemporary lives through digital spaces. Critical psychology frameworks are offered in order to situate the contemporary digital diagnostic cultures emergent in this study as historically bound and culturally contingent.