From Sweatshirts to Baseball Caps: Unpacking The Mental Health Apparel Boom

Words: Jax Preyer

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As mental health remains an increasingly salient talking point in the Gen-Z zeitgeist, brands have taken the bait and commodified therapy buzzwords into cheap, trendy goods. You can wear your mind, or rather the afflictions that plague it, on your sleeve. You could place a “Hot Girls Take Lexapro” mug on your desk, throw on a Pepto pink “Anxiety University” sweatshirt, and mindlessly scroll your phone encased in the words, “I Have Anxiety”, ironically making yourself more anxious in the process. 

These public displays of affliction are arguably harmless, albeit cloying, and very popular. While Etsy could easily serve as your one-stop-shop for depression and anxiety ephemera, the trend toward adopting psychiatric conditions and prescription drugs as kitschy slogans has brought about what I’m calling the “Mental Health Apparel Boom” — the sudden, prolific spawning of clothing brands touting messages of mental wellness and positivity. Visually, the amalgamation of these brands is a kind of lovechild belonging to the Tumblr “sad girl” meme aesthetic of the 2010s and West Coast surfer brands, resulting in nauseatingly brightly-colored sweatshirts and tees with phrases like “It’s okay not to be okay.”   

Madhappy, Happiness Project, Mayfair Group, and Little Words Project are the major players in the space that first come to mind, all of which to their credit make donations to social organizations to varying degrees. A quick Google search for “mental health awareness brand” spawns thousands of results, including imitators riding the coattails of the ever-elusive, loosely defined ethos of “awareness.” Some of these brands are vague about what it is - if anything - that they do to advance causes beyond the ever-noble “awareness-raising”. Others claim to donate a “portion” of their proceeds to charities without specifying how much of those proceeds are spent and on what charities. At times, it feels a bit like mental health greenwashing — the products are marketed in a way that suggests a commitment to philanthropic goals, without articulating how.
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Madhappy, like many other trendy, high-end brands, makes it perfectly conspicuous who does and does not belong in their clothes— their models skew overwhelmingly white and thin. Their clothes are not size-inclusive. They have partnered and threw a pop-up with Goldberg’s, a very popular, very pricey bagel shop in the Hamptons, and the collection is nearly sold out. The brand’s biggest cash cow, their hoodies, are going to run you a cool $185. Which, to be fair, is cheaper than the average cost of a single uninsured therapy session in the United States, where fewer than 40% of providers are in-network. 1% of Madhappy’s net sales go towards their internally run philanthropic endeavor, The Madhappy Foundation, which is legally designated as a tax-exempt nonprofit. Customers are prompted to make a direct donation to the Madhappy Foundation on their site rather than donating directly to one of the organizations they list as past and present partners. 

There is an inextricable link between the explosion of the wellness industry, to the tune of 1.8 trillion dollars, and the way brands like Madhappy participate in the nonprofit industrial complex. Be as it may that some of these brands do make contributions to fundraising organizations, the notion that creating and marketing apparel (often expensive apparel, at that) is a productive way to approach the crisis of American wellbeing is dubious at best. I am far from an economist, but I’d like someone to explain to me like I’m five years old how procuring funding to launch, market, and maintain an apparel brand only to donate 1% of your net sales to the solving the issues you’ve built your brand off of is in any way efficient. 

“There is a tremendous amount of interest in talking about ourselves, wearing quippy t-shirts, and putting stickers on our water bottles, but considerably less interest in addressing those material factors that can make being unwell in this country so often unbearable.”

On the other side of the coin are the cultural ramifications of over-identifying with psycho-emotional disturbances, a trend which in part explains the popularity of these brands. We’ve seen this issue demonstrated in the case of adolescents—recent data demonstrated the consequences of so-called awareness-raising campaigns which have unexpectedly backfired causing teenagers to ruminate on and ultimately pathologize normal human emotions and catastrophize over the state of their psyches, which they perceive to be more damaged than they actually are. It’s a not entirely surprising consequence of introducing heavy topics to teenagers without a strong apparatus to help them process it—another example would be 13 Reasons Why on Netflix, where a study found a 28.9% uptick nationally in the suicide rate for children 10-17 years old in the months immediately following the show's release. So: talking about it in school doesn’t work, and depicting it on television doesn’t work, perhaps the online community of social media where 51% of U.S. teenagers spend on average 4.8 hours per day will have the answers.

Unfortunately, it does not! Writer P.E. Moskowitz has written extensively about how social media has fanned the flames, encouraging the adoption of diagnoses as quirky personality traits. TikTok is practically overrun with armchair therapists spewing misleading information to assuage our doubts and discomforts about ourselves or the world we live in, like how our aversion to doing the dishes can be explained by childhood trauma. This kind of content not only encourages us to characterize any shortcoming or difficulty we may experience interpersonally as psychologically abnormal but also dismisses the structural realities that can make or break a person’s soundness of mind, understandably so—sky-high food costs, rent prices outpacing wages, barriers to affordable psychological care are all enough to drive a person out of their minds. 

There is a tremendous amount of interest in talking about ourselves, wearing quippy t-shirts, and putting stickers on our water bottles, but considerably less interest in addressing those material factors that can make this country, particularly being unwell in this country so often unbearable. Doing so would be incongruent with the idealogy of the Mental Health Apparel Brand and its flaky approach to “promoting optimism and positivity”. They may want you to get better, and they may want to one day achieve a country that can adequately look after all of its people, but above all else: they want you to buy the $185 sweatshirt.