Welcome to the very first episode of Doomscroll Dialogues. This is a new format of round table discussions, featuring returning guests alongside new and familiar faces. To inaugurate this series, I wanted to invite my dear friend (and fan favorite) Catherine Liu, professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine, and Freddie deBoer, celebrated author and cultural critic.
Our conversation explores some of the most pressing and divisive topics today; mental health, social justice and elite education — or what Freddie describes as “the gentrification of disability”. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve undoubtedly noticed a broadening in the definitions of certain mental health disorders; autism, trauma, TikTok induced multiple personality disorder and more. From both the top-down academy and bottom-up social media platforms, we see a drift in these previously distinct diagnoses and a reclassification of who really suffers.
In an increasingly uneven society, many well meaning laws and regulations, intended to accommodate the most marginalized, have been exploited by a class of ultra-competitive elites. Wealthy students in private colleges now get extra time on their exams, while working class kids in public schools can’t access necessary medications. In some instances, elites now seek to selfishly hoard scarce resources, within institutions or hospitals, at the expense of those who need it most.
Social media has amplified this crisis by expanding the scope of medical diagnoses into “online communities”. These voluntary forums grant victim status and serve as a pseudo-cultural identity for socially atomized individuals. Through “raising awareness” they also recruit the self diagnosed and further dilute the meaning of disability. Public displays of suffering are soon monetized into authenticity narratives that individualize suffering and replace political action with fragile emotional displays.
In class society, all of these processes result in similarly negative outcomes; increasingly affluent people absorbing the necessary resources and services that should be reserved for those in need. To understand this phenomena, we explore the influence of media across multiple decades; from novels, to television, to TikTok. In the end, we posit a proactive vision for disability protections and care under socialism.
Both guests have books coming out this fall that explore the cutting edge of mental health today. Catherine Liu is the author of “Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering” published by Verso Books. Freddie deBoer is the author of “All in Your Head: Illness as Identity, Trauma as Fashion, and the Desire to be Disordered”, available from Simon & Schuster.
Our conversation continues in Part 2:
Episodes of Doomscroll Dialogues are free to watch on Substack and Patreon. For now, we prefer to keep this format off of algorithm driven sites like YouTube and others. This platform allows us to discuss complex and sensitive topics without the distorting effects of the attention economy. We plan to continue this series a few times a year within our regular publishing schedule. Subscribe to get notified when new episodes are published:
This video is supported by The Palm Springs School for Social Research, an educational and research initiative dedicated to revitalizing critical theory and building new, resilient forms of intellectual and social life. PSSSR is a non-profit organization founded by Catherine Liu in 2026.
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