Young women and therapy talk

Another interesting piece from today's NYT is this one:

I’m a Psychiatrist. I’m Hearing Something New From Young Women.

The writer has got a book on the topic to promote, but her basic point is this:

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. 

Further down:

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.

I guess it's still a thing, so to speak, that we worry about men (especially young men?) bottling up their feelings and emotions and sometimes not undergoing any adequate self analysis, and on the other hand we worry about young women wanting to talk too much (and overanalyse) about the same thing.

I get the feeling that any school education about such things (not that I am sure there is?) needs to try to teach some sort of happy medium here:   some self reflection and recognition is good, but too much can be unhelpful in its own way.