Mood Disorder

"Refusing to feed the moral panic, Mood Disorder asks hard questions about why social media has been granted diagnostic authority as the primary mediator of mental health. Revealing how platforms merely echo the already flimsy biomedical categories shaped by Big Pharma, Holly Avella insists the real crisis lies in the economic, biological, and psychological thick of it. An essential reckoning."--Tony D. Sampson, coeditor of Affect and Social Media: Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion

"Mood Disorder provides an insightful analysis of digital mental health. Avella deftly moves between the biomedical, psychiatric, spiritual, and ritual ways that new technologies are creating and disciplining a mood. This book is vital for anyone looking to understand mental health--in all its complexity--in a digital age."--Adrienne Evans, coauthor of Digital Feeling

"This book captures developments in how mental health is made meaningful online, who benefits, and directions for more affirmative possibilities. Avella offers a fascinating and insightful contribution to the emerging field of digital affect."--Sarah Riley, coauthor of Postfeminism and Health: Critical Psychology and Media Perspectives

"From the Uberization of therapy apps to 'TikTok diagnosed me, ' Holly Avella persuasively unpicks the coordinates of mental health in a rapidly changing context shaped by platforms, brands, and vibes. A dazzling analysis of mental health and its entanglement with biomedical discourse, consumer culture, and tech."--Rosalind Gill, Professor of Inequalities in Media, Culture, and Creative Industries, Goldsmiths, University of London