From Hysteria to Hashtags: Diagnostic Spectacles and Euphoria ’s Algorithmic Afterlife

This article examines how young women on TikTok use the platform’s technology to reanimate scenes from HBO’s Euphoria as a means of articulating and aestheticizing their mental distress. Through parody, lip-syncing, captioning, digital filters, and audio reuse, they remediate televisual breakdowns into fragmentary performances that hinge on collective-media, psychiatric, and emotional fluency. In order to situate these videos within a longer history of new media and mental distress, this article draws on Georges Didi-Huberman’s analysis of Jean-Martin Charcot’s nineteenth-century portraits of hysteria at the Salpêtrière. Didi-Huberman argues that women patients performed “spectacles of pain” before the camera and medical audiences, displays that offered the women limited agency while simultaneously reaffirming their confinement through the visual authentication of diagnosis. Under Charcot, spectacle served the authority of medicine; on TikTok, it is redeployed by young women as a mode of identification and communication within algorithmic intimate publics. TikTok users stylize distress within the logics of their medium and cultural moment, turning psychic pain into digital spectacles shaped by popular media, contemporary diagnostic frameworks, and the platform’s confessional economy.