The name of this account implies it centers around mental health bent to the jokes, but it offers more than that. Many are more relatable gags about being a stressed young adult who struggles but somehow manages to continue with life.
According to Lola and Nicole, the account is "one of the fastest-growing aggregate Instagram accounts in history," climbing to 500,000 followers in its first six months. They also say it was the biggest meme account on Instagram to be run anonymously, until they introduced themselves to their fans and the internet.
At first, they didn't want to give away their identities in an attempt to avoid the criticism that women often face when they make jokes about how messy they feel. Only their mothers knew they ran the account. Both women even made their personal Instagram accounts private when they started My Therapist Says and don't post on them anymore. Their Facebook pages were made private too. They have given up on virtually all online presence outside of their memes.
Lola and Nicole met about 17 years ago in their hometown of Toronto and have been best friends ever since. After high school when Lola started spending long stints in Los Angeles picking up small acting gigs and Nicole was busy studying psychology at the University of Western Ontario, they started sending each other a lot of memes.
"The account just kind of came about as a way for us to keep in contact," Nicole told Cosmopolitan.
The name of their project isn't random. Both of them have been in therapy for years. Lola has what she calls "crippling shyness" and Nicole suffers from anxiety. "Every time I would talk to Nicole, I was like, 'My therapist said this,' and she'd say, 'No, I said that,'" Lola explained. "And I'm like, 'Well, you are basically my therapist, so.'"
Their memes reflect common complaints they make to each other (as well as their real therapists) about their anxiety-prone twentysomething lives: aggressive crush texting, impulsive shopping, canceling plans in order to sleep.
But Dr. Jaclyn Cravens-Pickens, a licensed marriage and family therapy associate who does not know Lola or Nicole scrolled through the account and told Cosmopolitan, "I'm not sure I see memes about mental health issues ... or anything that really reflects what I, as a therapist, say to my clients."
But something in the content did connect with Instagrammers who deal with anxiety and depression, and many followers began opening up in DMs and comment sections under the memes about their own problems.
"In the past, older generations have shown disdain at our preoccupation with our phones and our online lives, but during a pandemic, it's been an advantage to us to have this online presence solidified," Nicole explained to Daily Mail.
She said that millennials and Gen Z "have such a powerful online community where it's normalized and encouraged to seek help," which was an advantage going into quarantine.
"When we're all stuck at home, we feel less alone, as the initial shock was less pronounced for us given how intertwined our social lives already were with social media."
Lola said that the idea to publicly talk about mental health would legitimize the advice they themselves had received to the point where they would have to take it.
"This new generation, however, is so open and verbose on all things we used to deem inaccessible or unapproachable," she said. "I think it's going to do a lot of good for people in the long run, not having to feel ashamed or ostracized for feeling, or being, a certain way."
Lola said that "laughter is a powerful thing," adding that humorizing and satirizing a mental health issue helps "take away its power over you." And she's not alone. A few months ago, for example, we covered a social media manager who said making silly comics about his depression and anxiety have helped him tremendously in dealing with them.
Throughout the pandemic, the women behind My Therapist Says have shared and created quite many memes about quarantine, online dating, and Zoom calls, but they admitted there was an added pressure to not cross the line during a year that was clouded in tragedy.
"Each day was a fog of uncertainty, of worry, of what news tomorrow might bring — but we knew we had a responsibility to find the lightness amidst the dark," Nora said. "We certainly felt entitled to our own grief and confusion, but it was almost therapeutic trying to alleviate other people's worry with memes so as not to focus on our own."
