This project explores the relationship between social media and therapy. I focus on therapy culture as an everyday practice, this means how therapeutic ideas and practices circulate through social media and people’s lives, whether that be quotes on Instagram or some advice - e.g. “4 signs you need a break!” - by therapists and mental health advocates on TikTok. This project asks how going to therapy (or a psychologist, counsellor or life coach) influences what people do on social media, and how social media influences people’s experiences of therapy.

More information about the project is here.

PhD dissertation, RMIT University, 2018

My thesis focused 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 spectacular towards the quotidian. 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?