Over the past decade, psychiatrist Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell, MD, has noticed a striking shift in her practice. The girls and young women who come to her increasingly describe their pain, their conflicts, and the ordinary challenges of growing up in the language of diagnosis: anxiety, trauma, ADHD, dysregulation. Yet they struggle to put their feelings into words outside those labels, and in medicalizing their pain they often both dramatize and minimize it, obscuring what they are really facing.
In Girlhood, Translated: Understanding Young Women in the Age of Therapy Speak and Self-Diagnosis, Garfinkle-Crowell offers a compassionate, unabashedly pro-girl look at what it is like to be a young woman today. Blending clinical insight, cultural criticism, and intimate stories from the therapy room, she argues that therapy speak is something medicine and society handed to girls that is now alienating them from themselves and from the people who love them. She is clear-eyed about psychiatry’s pitfalls, from its gendered history to the rush to medicalize normal teenage emotion, while honoring its power to help and heal.
Cost: Free
Julie Deardorff
(847) 467-3147
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