Why Are We Obsessed with Self-Care?

TONIC reporter Shayla Love has tried many, many self-care products to help with her anxiety and OCD. But in the end, it wasn't green juice or essential oils that helped her. Those kinds of products are just a small piece in a larger mental health plan she has spent years developing. As she wrote in a recent piece for VICE Magazine, Shayla knows that self-care can be necessary in our increasingly stressful world, but she argues that when it's commodified—and, especially, when it stands in as a replacement for comprehensive mental health care—we’ve got a problem.

It’s estimated that in 2016, 275 million people worldwide experienced an anxiety disorder and around 268 million experienced depression. When these are the kinds of stats we’re dealing with, it’s important to take a critical look at why self-care products are so popular today and ask what this growing trend reveals about the flaws in mental health care—which Shayla breaks down on this episode of The VICE Guide to Right Now Podcast.

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