Young people, social media and new understandings of mental distress

British Academy/Wellcome Trust Conferences bring together scholars and specialists from around the world to explore themes related to health and wellbeing.

This conference brings together an outstanding interdisciplinary group of scholars, alongside activists and NGOs working on youth mental health, to discuss the ways in which everyday understandings of mental health and distress are changing. In the context of a widely documented mental health crisis among young people, we are interested in new ways of understanding psychological distress including the apparent de-stigmatisation of mental ill health, a paradoxical growing attachment to diagnostic labels, alongside simultaneous resistance to psychological/psychiatric expertise, and new emerging ways of representing mental distress from the ‘crying selfie’ to the playful, cuteness-informed language of the ‘menty b’.

Through expert presentations, conversations and creative workshops we ask: how are young people making sense of mental health today? What role do digital platforms and social media play in shaping new understandings of psychological distress? How are young people’s understandings situated in relation to critiques of medicalisation and the ‘psy-complex’? Is there a mismatch between everyday understandings of mental ill-health and those rooted in medical models? And do they reinforce or challenge inequalities related to race, gender, sexuality, class and disability?

Conference convenors

• Professor Rosalind Gill FBA, Goldsmiths University
• Professor Sarah Riley, Massey University of New Zealand

Speakers

• Adrienne Evans, Coventry University
• Ann Phoenix, University College London
• Anna Bailie, University of York
• Asma Istwani, Artist and Founder, Riot Soup Collective
• Christina Scharff, Kings College London
• David Harper, University of East London
• Emma Sheppard, Aberystwyth University
• Fredrika Thelandersson, Lund University
• Holly Avella, University of Maryland
• Jazza John
• Nia Sullivan, Abo Akademi
• Olly Parker, Head of External Affairs, Young Minds
• Oliver Chantler, Head of Policy and Public Affairs, The Mental Health Foundation
• Ruth Page, University of Birmingham
• Zeena Feldman, Kings College London
• Zoe Glatt, London School of Economics

Convener Biographies

Rosalind Gill FBA is Professor of Inequalities in Media, Culture and Creative Industries at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work focuses on power, inequalities and the relationship between culture and subjectivity.  She is author or editor of numerous books including Gender and the Media, Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (with Ana Elias and Christina Scharff), Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture (with Meg-John Barker and Laura Harvey), Confidence Culture (with Shani Orgad), and, most recently, Perfect: Feeling Judged on Social Media. She is currently researching everyday understandings of mental health and illness among young people.

Sarah Riley is a Professor in Critical Health Psychology, at Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her co-authored/edited books include Critical Bodies (2008); Technologies of Sexiness (2014), Postfeminism and Health, (2019; winner of the British Psychology Society book award), Postfeminism and Body Image (2022), Digital Feeling (2023), and Critical Health Psychology: Foundations, Approaches and Applications (2025, open access on Press Books); she has also published textbooks on qualitative methods. Her current projects focus on the intersections between identity, gender, and digital technologies and the possibilities for wellbeing that they enable or limit.

Further information

Hybrid conference, booking required.
Ticket Prices (per day)

• In-person: £40 standard | £20 concession (students, early career researchers, disabled, unwaged/retired)
• Online: £10 standard | £6 concession
  

All attendees will be provided with lunch, and refreshments throughout the conference.

There will be a drinks reception at the end of the first day, which starts at 5:30pm.

Image credit: Zane Statz, Upsplash.