Don’t judge me
One of the hazards of spending the summer writing UberTherapy is that I’ve have had to go deep into social media to look at what people have to say about therapy. The fastest way to feel like a loser is to go online and look at client/patient/student ‘rating’ of professionals. TikTok shorts and Reddit chatrooms brutally critiquing therapeutic performance, I find myself staring into a professional abyss.
Rate my professor. Just. Don’t.
In an attempt to get some traction for The Digital Therapy Survey I’ve been forced to take seriously the algorithms behind the Big Data Daddy in the sky. Fiddling around with whether to # anymore, honestly I feel a bit dirty. Partly because of the sleight of hand of the interface between mental health and the lite of being social. Partly because to the algorithm called X I tick no boxes which means in the internet of porn and great-abs I am set up for failure. Goaded by the tiny part of me that remembers when I did this well I see myself algorithmically invalidated as a middle aged woman and single parent as a thing of immense ugliness. As a feminist I am used to being repulsive for just breathing which makes it even more humiliating that there’s a part of me that thinks I have to just……
Suck. It. Up.
And as my defences go up the raging-shame me, the part I call Hair-n-Teeth comes out all punching and spitting. This humiliation goes into overdrive as the chatbot messages “You seem angry, are you angry?”
Hey. You. It’s. Just. Fun.
Which feels like nothing more original than a sexist joke followed by the mandatory where’s-your-sense-of-humour. Apparently my GSOH is lost in digital action.
Now here’s the really shitty bit of what happens in the algorithmic black box. It is disempowering to those of us who can’t or won’t get our (symbolic) tits out because the algorithm enlists shame. While I am making up hilarious threads I don’t see the boundaries between healthy-not-healthy. I don’t say no instead trying to game a system that is diametrically opposed to what I am. Invisible transgressions of my self that have become normalised until they suddenly don’t feel safe. OK until you’re not and then whatever shame inhabits us, heightened for those of us who have experienced trauma, is enlisted to shut down the parts of ourselves that are most likely to protect us. The parts of us that are most likely to relate. The ordinary human parts of ourselves that are not being busy-busy compulsively rating and rejecting on Tinder but are capable of accepting the facts of life.
In the dating profile car crash of psychoanalysis the facts of life are these. That we are not the centre of the universe no matter how many likes we get, that we are dependent on others to grow and to experience love, and then we die. Far from the world of omnipotently ghosting your on-demand therapist we require a mutual respect just to simply say what’s on our minds. To resist the algorithmic invitation to self-harm and to connect to the parts of ourselves that are capable of relating with good intentions. To just be ourselves in the company of others without judgement.
Surviving Work is quietly losing her mind writing UberTherapy: The new business of mental health to be published by Bristol University Press in 2024. To make this in any way manageable Surviving Work will be a monthly blog with periodic threads about The Digital Therapy Survey on social media @survivingwk and @DigitalTherapyS.