Jonah going down hill: has therapy and talk about ‘mental health’ been democratized to an unhealthy extent?
Author: Margaux Bang
Jonah Hill’s ex girlfriend opened up about her relationship with Jonah Hill claiming that he exhibited controlling and narcissistic behavior which resulted in emotional abuse. She shared screenshots where Jonah Hill criticizes her for posting pictures of herself wearing ‘provocative’ bikinis during her surf competitions. This prompted widespread conversation around Hill’s misuse of clinical language to excuse his own controlling behavior. Ironically so, Jonah Hill released a Netflix documentary in 2022 called Stutz which recounts his trajectory undergoing therapy with renown therapist Phil Stutz.
The case of Jonah Hill and his ex-girlfriend sheds light on the idea that therapy language might have been normalized and vulgarized in a way that can perpetrate negative repercussions on mental health. At the same time, the paradox lies within what motivated Sarah Brady to make the screenshots public in the first place “sharing this publicly now because keeping it to myself was causing more damage to my mental health than sharing it could ever do”.
While recent buzz around opening up about mental health publicly has democratized therapy in a way that is overall positive, this might also come with some downfalls. The normalization of ‘therapy talk’ has lead to its sterilization and allowed for looser use of terms such as ‘boundaries’ and ‘gaslighting’ without knowing what the words actually stand for and sometimes stripping them of their actual purpose and meaning. This begs the question: has therapy and talk about ‘mental health’ been democratized to an unhealthy extent?
