To our non-American readers: thank you for your patience as the U.S. takes its annual deep dive into pie, revisionist history, and family conflict about politics over dinner.

I haven’t seen Wicked yet — I haven’t needed to. My patients have brought it to me in vivid, anxious detail all week. What they are talking about isn’t the plot, or the music, or the spectacle. It’s the bodies on the screen appearing worryingly underweight: no, I’m not here to diagnose, speculate, or make claims about the actors’ health. That isn’t my place. What is my place, however, is noticing what the young people I work with notice — and how it lands in their minds and bodies.

Because it has landed. Hard. Almost every young person I’ve seen since the weekend has mentioned it — sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. Offhand comments, quiet worries, questions disguised as throwaway remarks. For some, the thinness looked “normal” or “aspirational.” For others, it triggered fear: Is that what I’m supposed to look like? Why do they look like that? Why can’t I? This is what unsettles me. The cultural normalisation of bodies that appear dangerously under-fuelled. When something is lit beautifully, costumed exquisitely, and sold as magic, it becomes harder for young people to recognise that what they’re seeing is not, in fact, wellness. It is aestheticised frailty.

Anorexia Nervosa does not need more PR. It does not need more glamour, more fantasy, more glitter-dusted proximity to desirability. It is a life-threatening illness that is already terrifyingly good at hiding behind aspiration. I am tired of watching young people try to negotiate a world where the thinnest bodies are still the most praised, the most photographed, the most algorithmically rewarded. And I am tired of pretending this kind of representation doesn’t matter. It does. It lands in their nervous systems before it lands in their language.

‘Wicked’ might be magical — but the aftermath I’ve seen this week has been anything but. This the part of the story no billboard will ever show. I don’t have all the answers, but I do have the responsibility to name what I’m seeing. Some versions of “magic” come at too high a cost — and our young people deserve better than that.

When the conversation starts to get spicy or even mild, but you know where it’s going, say with the confidence of someone who left something in the oven, “I need to go check on something.”

No follow-up details required. Mystery is your friend.

If it derailed the moment, it worked.

Then, most importantly, Stick. To. The. Boundary. No boundary is effective if you immediately explain, soften, or rejoin the debate out of guilt.

This year, I am happily NOT engaging in my usual holiday meal-planning spiral. I am not roasting, basting, brining, or pretending I understand how long a turkey takes to thaw. We’re ordering in, and not even turkey. A giant lasagna will grace our table, along with an arugula salad and some nice bottles of red. If this is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

Basically, Emma Thompson is doing what Emma Thompson does best: being a shit hot actor, stylish as hell (epic hair), and hilarious too.

It’s set in Oxford, and the city itself becomes part of the cast. The spires, the shadows, the sense that someone very bad indeed is probably watching you from a window.

And then there’s Ruth Wilson. If you’ve seen her in ‘Luther,’ you’ll recognise the particular brand of brilliant chaos she brings to the screen.

It’s sharp, stylish, unhinged, and exactly what an off-the-clock evening calls for.

In a week that holds both gratitude and historical truth, we wanted to highlight a place to shop that honors the communities at the heart of this holiday. Eighth Generation is a Native-owned company selling blankets, jewelry, and gifts designed by Indigenous artists (not “Native-inspired” knockoffs).

If you’re doing any Black Friday shopping (they’ve got a 20% off sale), consider supporting the artists and makers whose stories deserve center stage this time of year.

Shop here

No one thinks LinkedIn is hiding a giant red button labelled “suppress women.”

That’s the part Megan Cornish opens with — the bit we all feel in our bones. You can’t call it a conspiracy, but you also can’t call it nothing. You’re left wobbling on the tiny tightrope between “I’m sure it’s fine” and “wait, why is this happening to all of us?”

Her experiment — the viral “LinkedIn likes me better as a man” post — has dragged women (and men) into an uncomfortable but essential conversation about visibility, income, and safety in digital professional spaces. And this week, Megan did something most platforms would prefer she didn’t: she spoke directly with LinkedIn’s creator-side leadership and then told us what she heard, what she didn’t, and what still doesn’t add up.

Here’s the recap, but we encourage you to read it for yourself:

LinkedIn’s official line

Megan spoke with Laura Lorenzetti Soper, who leads global editorial/creator management at LinkedIn.

Here’s the gist of what LinkedIn insists:

All reasonable. All technically correct.

But also… completely misses the point.

Because Megan’s entire argument is not that LinkedIn built a sexist machine. It’s that a machine trained on biased human behaviour will behave in biased ways, even without malicious intent, and even without a gender field.

Corporate drift: how bias happens without a villain

My favourite part of Megan’s framing is this:

Most harmful corporate outcomes don’t start with a conspiracy. They start with:

Tiny decisions. Short-termism. Invisible trade-offs.

Until the end result is functionally indistinguishable from a moustache-twirling boardroom plot — just without the moustaches.

Women feeling less visible on LinkedIn doesn’t require a villain.

It only requires:

an algorithm + human bias + scale.

And that’s exactly the pattern Megan’s experiment exposed.

What Megan still sees (and thousands of us recognise)

The uncomfortable truth: LinkedIn doesn’t need to “hide women” for women to be hidden

Algorithms don’t need gender fields to behave in gendered ways. They just need training data that reflects the world.

Which… it does.

Women get less engagement → LinkedIn boosts what gets engagement → men appear more “relevant” → the machine learns the world as it is, not the world as it should be.

Tech calls this emergent bias. Women call it Tuesday.

So what do we do? Engage in Megan’s “test with me” approach

The part therapists will love: Megan doesn’t catastrophise. She doesn’t villainise. She stays exactly in the messy, nuanced middle — the space where systems change actually happens.

She suggests:

And honestly? It’s the first time I’ve seen someone discuss platform bias without slipping into “burn it all down” or “I’m sure it’s fine, sweetie.”

Therapist Brief’s Take: Why This Matters for Clinical Work

Because visibility is mental health.
Because safety is mental health.
Because the digital workplace is, increasingly, the workplace.

When women tell us they feel invisible, diminished, or punished online, it’s not imagined.

It’s patterned.

It’s structural.

And it has real consequences for:

And for our younger patients — especially girls — this is the water they’re swimming in. Professional identity is now algorithm-mediated before they even apply for their first job.

And here’s the part we don’t skip:

Megan is careful, and we need to be too: This is not about men being villains.

It’s about systems producing the same old outcomes unless someone forces them to change.

Women don’t need to “become men” on LinkedIn, but platforms do need to decide whether they are mirroring the world or reshaping it.

Right now, LinkedIn is doing a lot of mirroring.

And women are doing what we always do: making the invisible visible.

Even if it means balancing on a tiny, wobbly tightrope to say it out loud.

Here’s how our community responded:

We are grateful for these responses, which felt especially tender and were a good reminder that there’s no single right way to move through grief.

Comments from the Community:

“Each of my tattoos is a paw print of a pet I’ve lost. So I keep them with me every day, and no one else in the world has my tattoos. It’s been an important part of my healing journey when a companion crosses the Rainbow Bridge. ”