The Madness of Therapy Culture

All in Your Head: Illness as Identity, Trauma as Fashion, and the Desire to be Disordered By Fredrik DeBoer Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, $30 Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering By Catherine Liu Verso, 192 pages, $24.95More than a decade ago, I noticed that the walls at the university where I taught were plastered with posters designed to raise “awareness” about mental health. When students began to tell me that they were passionate about mental health, I began to suspect that the word was taking on new meanings. But it wasn’t until one passed me a leaflet in the foyer unhelpfully informing me that one in four people suffer from “mental health” that I understood what was happening. Somewhere along the way, the boundaries between mental health and mental illness had become blurred until the former meant the latter.

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