A BETTER SPLASH

by Jessica Burrell

London & Somerset, UK ALL HOUSES, GLOBAL

Such is the seven-day joy o ered by Soho House pools. ey can transform overnight from sites of debauchery and decadence to watery temples of reflection and solitude. ey can feel like wellness-boosting beacons among the dry monotony of city life, or like the blissful cocoon of the country incarnate. But the question remains – which lucky guest will you choose to take with you?

Jessica Burrell is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in British Vogue, ELLE and Vanity Fair

It seemed oddly appropriate when, in 2020, Meghan Markle mentioned Ma Haig on her podcast and featured him in her guest edit of British Vogue. She was a fan of his book Notes on a Nervous Planet, the meditation on anxiety which partnered his bestselling memoir on depression, Reasons to Stay Alive e liaison was perhaps energised by what has come to be known, since Brené Brown’s 2010 TED talk, as “the power of vulnerability” – shorthand for an openness towards mental health, mental illness and the fragility of our tender and highly relatable humanness. As the Greek tragedians knew, we need others to stage their stories so we can find ourselves in them, and Haig and Markle have become figures in contemporary psychodrama.

As with other megastar mental health authors – Ruby Wax and anxiety, Russell Brand and addiction, Stephen Fry with bipolar – both Markle and Haig have been brave and necessary in advocating for openness on the topic. If there’s a problem, it’s only that these airportpurchase standards obscure the everexpanding sum of enquiries into human pain that have gone before, many of which I’ve posted about on a platform often accused of leading such pain: TikTok.

On TikTok, I’ve narrated excerpts and insights on common human dysfunction from the books of Sigmund Freud, Taoist mystic Lao-Tzu and Hannibal Lecter’s favourite philosopher, Marcus Aurelius. Landing in the present day, I’ve presented summaries of trauma experts Gabor Maté and Bessel van der Kolk, plus psychoanalysts Darian Leader, Nina Coltart and Nuar Alsadir, whose 2022 book Animal Joy deserves to be the next Ma Haig-sized hit. Point being, for all their value, there’s more to an understanding of “fear and trembling”* than the go-tos of Haig, Wax, Brand and others. (* is epithet comes from the 1843 book by the original angsty young existentialist, Søren Kierkegaard.)

What these authors have in common is that, beyond thinking about why it hurts to be human, they have nothing in common. But taken together, they give lie to the easy notion that mental health and illness are the same for all of us. Beyond airport bookshops, the theory about those conditions is e ectively infinite, while the practice of healing them is similarly endless as human subjectivity is so varied.

If it seems strange for a 50-year-old man – formerly a journalist and now, a er three years of training, a psychotherapist – to be doing all this on a pla orm usually identified with Gen-Z, here’s the kicker:

Brighton, UK

by Kevin Braddock

it turns out TikTok (which I joined around the time Soho House did) loves books, so much so that the #BookTok hashtag helped authors sell 20m printed books in 2021, according to Bookscan. Four in five YA bestsellers have been driven by the #BookTok trend, and the success of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper and Madeline Miller’s e Song Of Achilles are both a ributable to the pla orm.

Incidentally, tiktok.com/@sohohouse launched with the opening of Brighton Beach House last May with a video of Heartstopper star Joe Locke in the pool. As George Serventi, Soho House’s Global Social Media Manager explains: “It’s been a year since we launched on TikTok. We’ve learnt so much from our community: how to connect with them, how to prioritise creativity and originality and, importantly, how much potential the app has.” tiktok.com/@recoveryreader

Meanwhile, doesn’t mental health awareness need to begin young? It’s the story told by educators, who are responding to what’s often called a “mental health crisis” among young people. Given that TikTok’s content tends to be less performative and perfectionist than that of the filtered and art-directed Instagram, spontaneous spoken-word content with a valuable message finds a friendly home there. TikTok was about being real before BeReal, a er all.

I can’t do anything about my age, but I can share what I’ve read that helps me live well. One of TikTok’s articles of faith is that user mentality is be er defined by mindset rather than age, and what works well is content that’s open, playful and generous without being too serious – all qualities which, oddly enough, lend themselves to positive mental health.

TikTok might be associated with young people, who are usually smarter and more curious than their elders might guess, but when we’re interested in mental health, we’re in touch with our conflicted inner teenagers, too. So it should be no surprise that #MentalHealth has racked up 71.8bn views on TikTok – in other words, 71.8bn definitions of what it means to be human.

Kevin Braddock

is a writer and

psychotherapist based in London