Mental health merch: conversation-changing or commodifying?

FFrom bakeries to bookstores, political parties and even individual authors, it has never been easier for consumers to show off their cultural connection through the clothes they wear. Now, a new category has entered the merchandise space: mental health.

Online retailers offer sweatshirts in soothing millennial pink with slogans like “Mental Health Matters” or “Anxious But Doing It Anyways.” Others simply list the brand names of antidepressants. Bestsellers on Etsy include graphic T-shirts with “Depressive But Make It Hot” and “This Barbie Takes Prozac.”

Both high street and high-end brands are participating. Streetwear favorite Praying sells one “You matter, don’t give up” gray hoodie for £137, while Primark’s £7 “empowering” T-shirts feature sayings such as “Surround yourself with people who bring good vibes”. This week Stella McCartney launched a limited edition bag with the words of American poet Cleo Wade: “The ride is long but it leads you home”. It is part of a collaboration between designer and mental health advocate Deepak Chopra, advocate of equine therapy.

While the topic of mental health has historically been left to secret hotlines and hush-hush doctors’ offices, it is now much more widely recognized and discussed. On TikTok, the mental health hashtag has been viewed more than 114 billion times, with users, some with millions of followers, documenting their “bad mental health days” and talking about therapy.

“These types of clothes can start a conversation,” says psychologist Dr. Audrey Tang. “Just as a blue badge allows you to park in a disabled space, wearing these types of tops gives expression and insight to others about how you feel.”

“A lot of people deal with mental health issues through humor,” says Sarah Russell, the founder of the Etsy store Grocery Apparel, which sells “Hot Girls Take Antidepressants” T-shirts, among other things. “Having something as weird as a T-shirt that makes it more recognizable can make people realize they’re not the only ones dealing with it.”

Travis Baskin, owner of a brand called Own Your Stigma that sells sweatshirts with the slogans “Coffee, Dogs and Mental Health” and “I feel all the feelings,” says the brand’s goal is to encourage conversation. It seems to be working: “Someone was wearing our T-shirt that said ‘It’s okay, not okay’ on the bus and a stranger came up to us and started talking to them about it. It normalizes it.”

A lot of it lies in the visual appeal of the clothing itself. Bright colors and slogans are catnip on social media. The messaging also encourages interaction through likes and comments, all elements that the algorithm rewards.

It all proves that, like anything else, even psychological well-being can be commodified. Last year, in a series dedicated to speculating trends for 2023, Retail wire revealed: “Mental health-focused messaging is quickly becoming a priority for retailers targeting the next generation of consumers.”

But similar to the way that wearing a Renaissance tour T-shirt or carrying a tote bag with the name of your favorite deli expresses not only your love of Beyoncé and bagels but also your cultural capital, there is an argument that Mental health merchandise means much more than just your emotional state. Just as therapy conversations have become part of the everyday lexicon, is it limiting for those who have a true anxiety disorder?

Tang says that while clothing with slogans can encourage conversation, it still doesn’t allow wearers to have deeper conversations around it. She also sees problems in defining oneself through one’s mental well-being. “A mental health problem consists of a diagnosis and a set of symptoms,” says Tang. “It’s not your identity.”

Tang also notes concerns about people carrying mental health items for “secondary gains,” saying, “The main gain from disclosing a medical condition or illness is the treatment. The secondary gain is the attention that comes from it. It’s the ‘Are you okay?’ from strangers.”

Fashion and mental health have a problematic past. In 2001, Alexander McQueen set his show in a space that resembled a padded cell. (Fashion described it as: “Demented girls, in hospital headbands and everything from extraordinary mussel skirts to impossibly chic pearl-colored cocktail dresses, slippery and strutting as they uselessly tried to fly over the cuckoo’s nest.”) Six years later, Vogue Italia featured a shoot by Steven Meisel entitled “Super Mods Enter Rehab,” in which model Lara Stone was dragged down a hospital corridor by nurses and locked in cells.

In 2019, the Gucci show opened with a series of models walking on a conveyor belt wearing what appeared to be a fashion version of straitjackets. In an unplanned protest, one of the models, Ayesha Tan-Jones, held up their hand, on which they had scrawled the words ‘mental health is not fashion’. They then posted a statement on Instagram: “Presenting these struggles as props for selling clothes in today’s capitalist climate is vulgar, unimaginative and insulting to the millions of people around the world affected by these issues.”

So is the commercialization of mental health care reductive? Russell says she wouldn’t be “terribly surprised” if customers purchased medical-themed items without actually experiencing the conditions. “But,” she says, “no one is going to go to the doctor and say, ‘I want this medicine because I saw it on a T-shirt’.”

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