21st Century Media and Female Mental Health: Profitable Vulnerability and Sad Girl Culture

by Fredrika Thelandersson

This open access book examines the conversations around gendered mental health in contemporary Western media culture. While early 21st century-media was marked by a distinct focus on happiness, productivity and success, during the 2010s negative feelings and discussions around mental health have become increasingly common in that same media landscape. This book traces this turn to sadness in women’s media culture and shows that it emerged indirectly as a result of a culture overtly focused on happiness. By tracing the coverage of mental health issues in magazines, among female celebrities, and on social media this book shows how an increasingly intimate media environment has made way for a profitable vulnerability, that takes the shape of marketable and brand-friendly mental illness awareness that strengthens the authenticity of those who embrace it. But at the same time sad girl cultures are proliferating on social media platforms, creating radically honest spaces where those who suffer get support, and more capacious ways of feeling bad are formed.
Using discourse analysis and digital ethnography to study contemporary representations of mental illness and sadness in Western popular media and social media, this book takes a feminist media studies approach to popular discourse, understanding the conversations happening around mental health in these sites to function as scripts for how to think about and experience mental illness and sadness

Genres: Sociology

340 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 22, 2022

Reviews

[Belen De Bruijn · Rating 3 out of 5]

haha accidentally read this whole book - while spiraling - writing my medical anthropology/ digital citizen essay

Interesting but at the same time our generation is so deeply engrained in this culture already that I didn’t learn that much from it + Lana Del Ray felt a bit too much of a main character in the whole story (:

[Qian Xie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fredrika Thelandersson’s book examines how the Western media landscape in the early twenty-first century shifted from an almost exclusive emphasis on positivity toward a space that increasingly accommodates sadness, vulnerability, and psychological distress. This shift, Thelandersson argues, manifests in two dominant forms. On the one hand, it appears as profitable vulnerability, in which mental health awareness becomes a marketable asset that enhances the perceived authenticity of celebrities and brands. On the other hand, it takes shape within the framework of “sad girl culture,” a cultural formation that encourages the exploration of diverse expressions of negative emotions and motivates individuals, particularly young women, to critically interrogate the roots of their own distress.

The book approaches sad girl culture primarily through a media lens, tracing its emergence, circulation, and cultural consequences. Thelandersson begins with a historical overview that moves from Victorian representations of female madness to the widespread use of antidepressants among Western women in the 1990s. She then examines the roles played by women’s magazines, female celebrities, and social media platforms in shaping twenty-first-century understandings of women’s mental health and illness. Through this genealogy, the book situates contemporary discussions of female sadness within longer traditions of pathologizing, regulating, and aestheticizing women’s emotional lives.

Importantly, Thelandersson emphasizes that the definition of the “sad girl” is far from singular. Some scholars trace the term back to a 1990s appropriation of Latin American cultural contexts, in which the “sad girl” signifies a woman who has endured hardship yet remains resilient. In contrast, within a post-2008 Western white cultural context, the sad girl is more often understood as “a young woman who is unashamed of her emotional life and who fearlessly acts out her pain for others to see” (Alderton, The Aesthetics of Self-Harm: The Visual Rhetoric of Online Self-Harm Communities, xx). Thelandersson argues that the emergence of this figure, and the culture surrounding it, should first be read as a rejection of postfeminist emotional norms. Postfeminism, intertwined with neoliberal ideology, demands that women in the twenty-first century fashion themselves as ideal neoliberal subjects: confident, independent, self-managing, and relentlessly oriented toward self-optimization. Sad girl culture disrupts these affective expectations by foregrounding emotional fragility, despair, and failure.

A second key factor in the rise of this cultural formation is the 2008 global financial crisis, which intensified collective anxiety and transformed female celebrities into scapegoats for broader economic anxiety. For instance, Britney Spears publicly disclosed her experiences with anorexia and depression in 2007, but public responses were largely hostile and dismissive then. Although the negative emotional experiences of other female celebrities were reported during this period, such accounts were typically mediated and indirect rather than articulated by the women themselves. Around 2015, however, Thelandersson identifies a notable shift. Increasing numbers of celebrities began to speak openly and proactively about their mental health struggles. This transformation was partly enabled by the growing visibility of mental health awareness campaigns and advocacy discourses. At the same time, it reflected a broader change in celebrity branding and media representation toward what Thelandersson describes as ordinariness, the idea that celebrities are “just like us.” Within this context, certain stars benefited from what she terms profitable vulnerability: by publicly exposing their fragility, celebrities, particularly those with damaged reputations, could regain cultural legitimacy and commercial value.

Digital platforms such as Tumblr and Instagram played a crucial role in facilitating the spread of sad girl culture. These spaces enabled the circulation of affective communities grounded in shared experiences of sadness, while often articulating an explicitly anti-capitalist or anti-neoliberal worldview. Through these platforms, sad girl culture became not only a mode of self-expression but also a critique of the emotional demands imposed by contemporary media and economic systems.