Girlhood, Translated: Therapy Speak, Identity, and Girls

"Drawing on her deep experience in adolescent psychiatric care, Dr. Garfinkle-Crowell helps us understand why girls now seek validation and support through diagnostic labels they discover largely on social media, and why speaking in shorthand about trauma, toxicity, and anxiety disempowers girls and flattens their emotional lives. Meanwhile, parents and other concerned adults often respond to this heightened therapy speak with alarmism or dismissiveness, which only makes the problem worse, even when everyone has the best intentions. We are left with a culture in which girls are-rightly, desperately-asking for healing and connection, but in a language that cannot get them either. Through storytelling that is warm, vibrant, and refreshingly authentic, Dr. Garfinkle-Crowell exposes the forces confronting today's youth and guides us through the power-and peril-of therapy culture. Girlhood, Translated shows how both girls and those who care about them can break free of the language of illness, start telling their own stories in their own words, and return girlhood to girls"-- Provided by publisher.