The self-help industry on Instagram: The case of the Holistic Psychologist

With the entry of new media tools into our lives, the forms of circulation of information and discourses have taken on new forms. In the neoliberal period, "individual well-being discussions" also constitute an important part of the discourses that are constantly produced and circulated about. The self-help industry, consisting of many subjects such as psychologists, personal developers, and yoga instructors, has been producing various discourses on "healthy individuals" since the beginning of modernity. In the field of mental health, the discourses produced for years on "individual well-being" have gained a whole new circulation with the increasing number of psychologists and personal developers starting to use new media tools. In this thesis, to understand what kind of discourses the self-help industry produces on "healthy individuals" using the Instagram platform today, Dr. Nicole LePera's The Holistic Psychologist account, which has millions of followers, will be examined. Thus, it will be examined how the dominant discourses produced to date on the mental health of modern individuals, which occupy an important place on the agenda of modern capitalist societies, are addressed in the shares of our psychologists who share on Instagram, which has become a popular medium for mental health today.