"Welcome to a day in the life of a psych-ward patient." A TikTok creator called BPD Babe rolls out of a bed full of cuddly toys. Awaiting a consultation, she kicks her Crocs in the air with excitement, like a toddler. Later, a "wave of sadness" hits; the camera captures her bent double, weeping into a big yellow plushie. But it's not all bad; she opens packages from fans, including a rabbit-ear headband which sends her into a fit of cartoonish, scrunched-nosed joy. She tells us how excited she is to launch her line of t-shirts, emblazoned with the phrase "BPD girl summer". This is the frightening new aesthetic of mental illness.
The "grippy socks vacation", so called after the non-slip socks given to shoeless psychiatric inpatients, has become a Gen Z fixation. Like other TikTok trends, this involves a clutch of symbols, visual shorthand for entry into the club of depression/anxiety/schizophrenia "girlies". Among these is a prominent red mark on the forehead -- a coveted accessory in pouty lip-sync videos which carry the hashtags "mhawareness" and "sectioned". These headwounds have become an appalling hallmark of British psych-ward TikTok, which interestingly has not yet caught on Stateside. The result of head banging (the only self-harm possible in such wards), they speak to genuine torment -- but are also seem performatively conspicuous, shown off by groups of friends. It all sharply echoes the competitiveness of anorexia wards; a well-documented perversity of the teen-girl affliction is its "epidemic" nature, which sees inpatients egg each other on, with feeding tubes becoming a similar stigmata.
But this fresh fixation on mental health reflects a new social reality: in secure-care settings, young women are nine times more likely than young men to have a psychiatric diagnosis. Whereas men in psychiatric intensive care units (PICUs) are much more likely to be sectioned for aggression, substance use or psychosis, women are overrepresented in cases of self-harm and suicidality. In the UK, Covid provoked a disproportionate increase in women detained under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act, a rise of 48% in one NHS trust in Gloucestershire. Meanwhile, American girls are reporting record levels of sadness and suicidal thoughts. We can safely assume that the data supports a Western diagnosis larger than a mere TikTok trend -- yet social media scaffolds the experiences of so many disturbed young women, who gain fans (and often financial rewards) for documenting their suffering.