Support + subcultures: mental health on social media

Video Projection Installation

The rise of social media has made information and discourse on any subject more accessible, including the subject of mental health. While the prevalence of mental health issues in the US has significantly increased over the past decade, it’s now easier than ever for social media users to educate themselves, find supportive communities, access helpful resources, and contribute to destigmatizing these issues. However, they are just as likely to encounter detrimental misinformation, enabling of unhealthy behaviors, and even glorification of some disorders.

My senior thesis project, Support and Subcultures: Mental Health on Social Media uses postmodern approaches and themes of recontextualization, appropriation, intertextuality, identity, and irony to display the overwhelming effect that mental health content can have on social media users. A trendy, youthful digital aesthetic embodies the online space, layering examples of helpful and harmful content together to the point of blurring the line between the two and saturating the viewer with information thr.

Support and Subcultures examines both the constructive and destructive effects of mental health-related content, prompting viewers to distinguish between the positive, negative, and neutral examples featured, with the understanding that some examples may be clear and others more nuanced and subjective. The intention is to bring viewers to reflect on their own ideas of mental health and think critically about information found and shared online, for themselves or those in their lives susceptible to this content.