u/BringMeInfo

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.

They had researched their symptoms on Instagram; they’d taken TikTok quizzes about them; they had cross-indexed their conditions with those of their friends. It was everyone — gravel-voiced film majors and earnest high school athletes, class presidents and girls who skipped school, girls who spent weekends in the Hamptons and girls who had to work for their spending money. The patients of this new wave were talking in therapy-speak, and their therapy hadn’t even started.

The physician part of me would instantly start thinking through an alphabet soup of treatments for the conditions these girls were reporting — D.B.T., C.B.T. and E.M.D.R. and medications to go with each.

Another part of me — the parent, the Xennial — would struggle to suppress an inner eye roll. If you’re a parent of an adolescent girl, you might have experienced your own version of these two reactions: either terror for your daughter’s psychological well-being or alienation from all the jargon. You might have even tried to convince your daughter that everything was fine. None of those responses set us up to hear what these girls and young women are trying to say.

I’ve been listening to girls every day for years, and I’ve learned a few things that can help parents, therapists and anyone else who struggles to communicate with young women as they describe some form of distress.

It starts with accepting that diagnosis words may function differently for these young women from the way they do for others. They are not necessarily claims to cold, scientific truths, yoked to specific evidence-based treatments. Instead, research increasingly reveals, these words are often a coping mechanism, an effort to find some accepted narrative in which to situate one’s very personal pain. We should try to hear them that way: We should take the therapy-speak, to borrow an expression, seriously but not literally.

One girl told me she had assigned herself a diagnosis of depression, which she later acknowledged she thought would make me care about her. Another girl was stuck on an A.D.H.D. diagnosis, mostly because it made her feel less alone by connecting her to a vocal and vibrant online community.

Several young women insisted they fit the clinical definition for anxiety, because it was less scary to blame an inherent flaw in their brains than to explore the causes of their very real discomfort — which turned out to be a mix of anger toward their loved ones and guilt for having those feelings. Another girl said she used her various self-diagnoses as a container for whatever felt like “too much” about her, allowing her to fulfill what she thought was the teenage female’s highest calling: to be chill.

In some cases, my patients’ self-diagnoses were spot on. In many others, however, the psychiatric label seemed more like a compromise between uncomfortable feelings and the desire for social acceptance. Are these labels a source of strength or a straitjacket? Are they helping young women find help and acceptance or standing in the way? The answer isn’t so simple.

Adolescent girls and young women aren’t the only ones reaching for therapy-speak, of course. According to some measures, 50 percent of Gen Z-ers have labeled themselves with mental health conditions, and illness identities have taken hold of young people, both online and off. But girls are by far the primary drivers of this trend. They are the main group looking up health information online, talking about their feelings and relationships and seeking labels for what’s wrong.

They are also the demographic with the worst mental health profile. I think the association with young women, a group so often dismissed as frivolous, is a big part of why therapy-speak is regarded as a sign of weakness and self-indulgence.

As for therapists, we think about psychiatric diagnosis a lot less than you might imagine. That’s partly because categories in our field tend to be more flexible than those in other areas of medicine. Classifications often evolve and change over time, especially for young people and most of all for young women. Besides, no two people experience these conditions in exactly the same way. So we always have to try to understand the person first.

I am less than a year into my first post-MSW job. So far, it has been wonderful, and I have had an amazing supervisor who has helped me refine my skills so much. Unfortunately, my supervisor has decided to leave her position.

My biggest issue is that when she leaves, I will be the senior most social services person at this facility. Again, I am less than a year out from graduation, and I do not feel that operating without on-site supervision is within my competency, so staying in this role for what will likely be several months without good supervision feels ethically dicey (and not great for my professional development).

Furthermore, I have really enjoyed some aspects of this work, but I am realizing there are large chunks of it that are not for me and other roles would be a better fit. Think "I want to focus on long-term work and this has a lot of short-term crisis work."

Meanwhile, I found an open position yesterday that is much better aligned with my interests and pays significantly better.

So what would you do? Would you just stick it out to hit the one-year mark and supervision be damned? If you would apply for the new position, how would you frame your short tenure in the current position?

I know, I know, obituaries kind of sit on the border of history and current events...

I have a client who has been contending with IPV and stalking. They are now planning to pursue an order of protection, and I would like to prepare them for talking to the police. What information should they expect the police to ask about?

Especially interested to hear from any NYC SWers.

>The Supreme Court’s ruling Tuesday upholding state bans on transgender athletes in women’s sports is prompting questions about whether trans rights litigators have made strategic missteps, saddling the ascendant legal movement with sweeping precedents that could hurt their cause for years to come.

Critics, including some trans rights advocates, say the movement has rushed to tee up causes that the court’s 6-3 conservative majority is not ready to embrace — particularly expanded rights for trans athletes, which polls show most Americans oppose. Given the high court’s solidly conservative record on LGBTQ+ issues, some supporters of trans rights are delivering a sobering message: Keep cases away from the Supreme Court.

“The question right now is not whether transgender advocates should fight or not fight — it’s whether going to hostile courts is the most prudent move,” said Duncan Hosie, a fellow at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center and a supporter of legal protections for trans people.

In Public Speaking (2010), Fran Lebowitz argues that early HIV transmission in gay male communities was structured by dense sexual and social networks, and that in tightly interwoven arts scenes this meant the most socially central figures, often also key artistic, critical, and institutional nodes, were among the first to die. She further suggests this produced a cascading sequencing of deaths among progressively less central figures across New York’s theatre, dance, and downtown performance ecosystems.

Can her claims withstand historical scrutiny? Or are they no more than charming aphorisms?

News, but it's also history?

A potentially important development in the issues surrounding student loan availability for MSW.

>The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Maryland, comes nearly three weeks after the Education Department finalized rules that lower the amount of money graduate students can borrow from the federal government. The rules, which take effect July 1, are a feature of the One Big Beautiful Bill that President Donald Trump signed into law last summer. They implement borrowing caps based on whether students are pursuing a degree in what is designated as a professional or graduate program.

Students in professional programs can borrow up to $50,000 a year and $200,000 total, while those in graduate programs will face annual limits of $20,500 and a lifetime limit of $100,000.

The law listed examples of professional programs, including pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry and theology.

Before now, all graduate students could borrow up to the full cost of attendance, which conservative lawmakers blamed for high program costs and high student debt.

In the fall, the Education Department and a committee of higher education experts negotiated the details of the loan caps, but the terms sparked a backlash over the exclusion of some professions from the higher loan limits, including nursing, physical therapy and social work. The department received more than 80,000 comments on the proposed rule, with many industry groups challenging the professional designation and warning that students would be shut out of critical fields.

Professional degrees are not limited to the list, the regulation says, but the Education Department held fast to the examples — only agreeing to add clinical psychology after intense debate with experts.

Despite the outcry, the Education Department refused to further expand the list of degrees deemed professional in the final rule.

In the lawsuit, the states claim the department exceeded its authority with an arbitrary definition of “professional degree” that Congress never envisioned.