Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell in NYT: ‘Several years ago, I started noticing something new when teenage girls or young women came to my office for their first psychiatric sessions. Patients used to dread being told that there was something, as they saw it, wrong with them. Now these young women were announcing their diagnoses — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, depression — almost before telling me their names.’

And: ‘We should take the therapy-speak, to borrow an expression, seriously but not literally.’

Also: ‘Ideally, we should create an environment in which girls can stop blaming their own brains for every problem and where they don’t feel they have to be sick to be heard.’

As a Dutch therapist recently said: we can no longer accept failure, so to make sense of it, we have to come up with an illness to explain it.

In the meantime, therapy-speak and other kinds of poetry.

(a sf 2211)