Girlhood, Translated

Over the past decade, psychiatrist Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell noticed that girls were coming to her office with an increasingly long list of psychiatric diagnoses, often pulled from social media. It seemed like it was becoming impossible for young women to talk about their feelings without connecting them to mental illnesses like anxiety or PTSD. At the same time, she saw a growing communication gap between the girls and their parents, who often responded to this jargon, unhelpfully, with either alarm or dismissiveness.

In Girlhood, Translated, Dr. Garfinkle-Crowell explores how ‘therapy speak’ is fundamentally reshaping the identities of girls and young women.  While some terms help girls name problems and find common ground, the reflexive use of self-diagnosis inadvertently plays into the age-old cliché that teenage girls are ‘hysterical’ and ‘crazy’. Drawing on vibrant, moving stories from the therapy room, Dr. Garfinkle-Crowell helps us see that girls often rely on medical labels to be heard – and how we all might do a better job listening.