Intimidades públicas y narrativas biográficas de experiencias de depresión en YouTube (Argentina, 2018-2024)

Social networks contribute to the expansion of biographical space and the widening of the sphere of public intimacies. People who suffer from depression, a diagnosis historically carrying stigma that leads to shame and concealment of this condition, use digital technologies to share these intimate experiences with a wide audience. This article investigates the purposes of advertising or coming out of the closet of depression on social networks. The objective is to describe and analyze biographical narratives of people who suffer and/or suffered from depression and reside in Argentina. Specifically, it addresses the repertoire of motivations and interests in making public experiences considered intimate by media figures, YouTubers and people without a public profile in YouTube videos. Using the biographical method in its life story aspect, a corpus of 37 audiovisual videos available on YouTube from 2018 to 2024 is analyzed. Based on these biographical documents, categories are constructed that distinguish a plurality of motivations and interests associated with publishing personal experiences of depression. Within this multiplicity of forms, which are complementary, we identify an arc that ranges from the transformation of the subject themself, through helping and advising other people, to ways of communitizing suffering. This article seeks to make a sociological contribution to the study of the transformations of public intimacies, with special emphasis on the contemporary experiences of depression on the internet

Art · Humanities · Political science · Sociology · Gender, Health, and Social Inequality · Mental Health and Patient Involvement · Psychological Treatments and Disorders

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