Mental health marketing is increasingly examined not only for the products it sells, but also for the diagnoses and identities it can help popularize. The strategy may create demand for a particular way of understanding distress that lasts beyond any single medication or service.
The article draws on Douglas Atkin’s concept of “brand cults,” outlined in his 2004 book The Culting of Brands. Atkin argued that brands can build exceptional loyalty by offering consumers meaning, belonging, shared values and a common language. His recommended strategies include presenting consumers as different, emphasizing membership and creating an identity around the brand.
In mental health, similar dynamics can emerge when marketing messages become intertwined with medical explanations. Pharmaceutical promotion has often focused on expanding recognition of a diagnosis through public relations campaigns, sponsored conferences, lobbying, screening and awareness initiatives. In this model, the diagnosis becomes the enduring market, while demand for a product follows.
The article notes that medication can be an important treatment for many people, but argues that its promotion may reduce complex experiences to simplified biological explanations involving substances such as serotonin or dopamine. Such messages can draw attention away from social, environmental and other possible biomedical factors that also shape mental health.
Social media adds another layer through the spread of “therapy speak”: a mixture of popular psychology, therapeutic language and loosely applied clinical terms. These expressions can help people find community and describe difficult experiences, but they can also turn diagnoses into definitive explanations rather than descriptions of symptoms.
In online discussions, mood swings may be attributed immediately to bipolar disorder, difficult relationships to narcissism and sadness to depression. The article describes this process as self-reinforcing, with algorithmic systems repeatedly presenting diagnostic explanations and related content. It also warns that broad labels can limit further discussion of trauma, relationships, personal capacities and the circumstances surrounding distress.
This diagnostic culture is connected to a wider consumer ecosystem that includes therapy platforms, mental health content and products marketed as solutions to newly defined problems. The resulting loyalty may be directed less toward one specific product than toward a diagnosis and the worldview associated with it. Social media users can also become “co-authors” of these identities by creating and circulating their own interpretations and stories.
The article does not dismiss the value of online communities. Sharing experiences of struggle and recovery can be a genuine strength of social media. Instead, it argues that users and professionals should remain aware of how diagnostic identities can be shaped by branding, platforms and commercial incentives, while keeping mental health needs at the center.
Sources: Psychology Today.