Mental Health and the Self-Tracking Student

Abstract

This article examines universities’ adoption of WellTrack—a self-tracking mobile phone application modeled on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques—as a solution to reported increases in the prevalence and severity of student mental health conditions. Drawing from a feminist materialist perspective that understands discourse and the material word as co-produced, this article argues that the app’s design, marketing, and reception are deeply intertwined with the political rationality of neoliberalism, which centers self-responsibility and the market economy. The article first situates the development of the WellTrack app within larger institutional and political shifts towards digital education governance. It then contextualizes the app’s use within the history of college mental health services in the United States, revealing how longstanding socio-medical discourses concerning student wellness individualize structural and systemic factors of ill health. Through close reading and immanent critique of the marketing and media reception of the WellTrack app’s introduction into universities, the article provides an account of how universities are socializing students to relinquish data to private firms in exchange for health services. Students are encouraged to engage in constant self-examination and strive towards a vision of student wellness that precludes an analysis of the structural conditions and intersecting oppressions contributing to poor student mental health. These conditions are social and pervasive, requiring institutional analysis and critique of the university itself.