The Algorithm Will See You Now: Theratainment and the Digital Commodification of Mental Health

From Oprah to TherapyTok, this interactive talk explores how mental health becomes entertainment, why therapists turn to social media, and what happens when care depends on commercial visibility.

What happens when therapy becomes entertainment, and care becomes content?

Drawing from my forthcoming book, And How Does That Make You Feel? Theratainment and the Digital Commodification of Mental Health (University of California Press), this interactive talk examines how therapeutic discourse has become embedded in commercial media, from the confessional stages of daytime television to the algorithmically curated feeds of TikTok.

I introduce the concept of theratainment to examine how therapeutic expertise, emotional vulnerability, and practices of care become reorganized through entertainment conventions, platform governance, creator labor, and commercial media economies. Tracing a history through The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dr. Phil, Intervention, and Teen Mom, I explore how television established enduring conventions of public confession, emotional spectacle, individualized responsibility, and commercialized care.

The talk then draws on interviews with 42 licensed mental health professionals creating content on TikTok, an analysis of 150 videos, and digital ethnography to investigate why therapists participate in social media and how they negotiate professional credibility, audience expectations, algorithmic visibility, and the labor of care.

Rather than a traditional lecture, the session invites participants to engage with the book's arguments through media examples, collective discussion, and an interactive activity called The Theratainment Lab. Participants will work through a fictional therapist-creator scenario to consider the competing demands of professional responsibility, public accessibility, audience engagement, and commercial sustainability.

Ultimately, the talk explores what I call the care paradox: therapeutic discourse becomes increasingly visible and culturally normalized while the material infrastructures necessary for sustained, equitable care remain inaccessible or inadequate. Together, we'll consider what it might mean to imagine care beyond the demands of commercial visibility.

Dr. Krysten Stein is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College and a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum, Germany. Her research examines digital culture, therapeutic discourse, platform capitalism, and identity, with particular attention to popular media, mental health, and care. She is the author of the forthcoming book And How Does That Make You Feel? Theratainment and the Digital Commodification of Mental Health (University of California Press). In 2026, she received the International Communication Association's Popular Media and Culture Division Early Career Scholar Award.