Thanks for the archive link, @Puzzledandpissedoff.
Extract:
Dr Max Pemberton [psychiatrist]:
Children like these are nowadays repeatedly told by a wider culture (largely but not exclusively online) that their suffering is their identity. Their trauma is their ‘story’. The worst thing that ever happened to them is also the most interesting thing about them.
It’s a deeply unhelpful mindset that we in mental health services are desperately trying to undo.
And yet here was Meghan, in front of them, doing precisely that, framing her entire life in terms of damage done to her.
There is a pattern here that anyone working in mental health will recognise. Call it a victim identity, or a victimhood mindset, it’s the psychological trap where a person, often following a period of real hurt, begins to build their whole sense of self around the injury ...
... Both of them [H&M], in their different ways, are modelling something deeply unhelpful for a generation already struggling.
People watching can only conclude that the way to prove you are ‘real’ is to keep announcing how wounded you are.
I fear they are teaching these kids that the correct response to hurt is not to heal it but to monetise it.
... if you have built your identity on being the most wronged woman in the world, none of that is any good to you. You need the trolls to keep trolling or your brand bites the dust.
I worry about the young women in that audience. Some will go home and examine their own lives through this new lens. They’ll catalogue every slight, every bad day, every word flung in anger. And they will imagine their suffering is what defines them and makes them who they are. It is not healthy.
(My emphasis)