Girlhood, Translated

A clear-eyed child psychiatrist reveals how “therapy speak” and the culture of self-diagnosis is reshaping the inner lives of adolescent girls and young women—and what to do about it.

Why do young women so often describe their feelings and personalities as signs of psychiatric illness like ADHD, OCD, anxiety disorders, and depression? Is there any other way for girls growing up in today’s “therapy culture” to understand and manage their emotional lives? In this engaging and compassionate book, Dr. Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell argues that therapy speak is alienating girls from themselves and from those around them, and offers both girls and the adults in their lives a way to find the language they need to reconnect.

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.Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell is a psychiatrist who treats children, adolescents, and adults. She studied English at Amherst College and received a Master of Science degree in Theoretical Psychoanalysis from the University College, London. She completed her medical and residency training at Columbia University/New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she is Founding Director of the Academy for Medicine and the Humanities. She lives with her family in Greenwich Village.