PhD Oral Exam - Fanny Gravel-Patry, Communication Studies

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

Since the late 2010s, many women have been turning to Instagram for mental health care because of limited health care resources and increasing gendered pressures to take care of themselves. Mainstream media were quick to term this phenomenon “Instagram therapy”, creating a moral panic around the dangers of replacing individualized therapy with social media. This is not surprising since women’s emotions and media practices have been historically pathologized under a longstanding gendering of “insanity” in popular culture and discourses. Attending to women’s social media use through the concept of self-care as a media practice, this dissertation shifts the conversation to ask why and how women use Instagram to care for their mental health. The goal of this research is two-fold: 1) to contribute to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the relationship between women’s mental health and mediation within expanding health and social media landscapes, and 2) to complicate contemporary understandings of the intersections of mental illness, gender and self-care against a backdrop of scarce mental health resources and gendered pressures to self-optimize.

Through feminist qualitative methods, this dissertation gives voice to fifteen women aged between twenty-two and forty-nine who live with mental illness by documenting their use of Instagram, their motivations as much as their challenges, through in-depth interviews and media go-alongs. Three aims emerge from their stories: 1) to find validation for their experiences, 2) to care for each other, and 3) to find relief in everyday habits. These findings reveal that these women’s use of Instagram is not an alternative to therapy necessarily but adds to their existing (yet limited) resources. As such, they offer more accessible and sustained ways for women to care for themselves as they learn how to live with mental illness. These results reveal the nuanced ways in which women navigate Instagram and negotiate with the platform's affordances, publics and visualities to care for themselves, shedding light on the multiple realities that co-exist in the doing of care. Beyond the topic of mental illness, this dissertation calls for more attention to what we do to care for ourselves while living in a world that is designed to alienate and exclude us; how we create space for ourselves using the tools available to us; how we exist with each other within our complexities, contradictions and frictions as we learn to inhabit our bodymind/worlds.