Digital Ecologies of Youth Mental Health: Apps, Therapeutic Publics and Pedagogy as Affective Arrangements

TLDR

Public pedagogy frames how expert mental‑health literacy and youth‑generated digital practices address mental ill health on social media. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to analyze how formal and informal pedagogical sites intersect in youth mental‑health learning, focusing on digital health technologies. The authors trace pedagogic modes of address in digital mental‑health practices and therapeutic publics, analyzing mental‑health apps to show how these modes shape affective learning and render embodied distress culturally intelligible. They locate individual mental‑health app use within a broader digital ecology mediated by therapeutic expertise, contributing new insights to public‑pedagogy theory.

Abstract

In this paper, we offer a new conceptual approach to analyzing the interrelations between formal and informal pedagogical sites for learning about youth mental (ill) health with a specific focus on digital health technologies. Our approach builds on an understanding of public pedagogy to examine the pedagogical modes of address (Ellsworth 1997) that are (i) produced through ‘expert’ discourses of mental health literacy for young people; and (ii) include digital practices created by young people as they seek to publicly address mental ill health through social media platforms. We trace the pedagogic modes of address that are evident in examples of digital mental health practices and the creation of what we call therapeutic publics. Through an analysis of mental health apps, we examine how these modes of address are implicated in the affective process of learning about mental (ill) health, and the affective arrangements through which embodied distress is rendered culturally intelligible. In doing so, we situate the use of individual mental health apps within a broader digital ecology that is mediated by therapeutic expertise and offer original contributions to the theorization of public pedagogy.