Gratitude for Taylor Swift

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PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

I can hardly believe that I am tailoring a column on Taylor Swift. After all, I’m not a Swiftie, most of whom are mainly young women, and I’m not even a pop music fan. Those who have been following these columns know that I’m a jazzer, and as part of that I love jazz women singers, suc

h as Billie Holiday and Cecile McLoren.

Perhaps my inspiration is the leftover gratitude influence of Thanksgiving. Added to that are all the headlines last Sunday at the end of her groundbreaking, lucrative, and immensely popular world “Eras Tour.” Moreover, during the long tour, Swift was named Time’s Person of the Year in 2023. President-Elect Donald Trump was just named that for 2024.

Yes, I also did swiftly notice when she and her followers came out in favor of Kamala Harris for president. I have to admit that, as a football fan, I did pay even more attention to her as she began to date the star football player Travis Kelse, attending his games when not on tour. Apparently, the 2 families of Swift and Kelse spent Thanksgiving together, and she referred to Kelse with a special “Karma” lyric during the tour.

Even so, it was an article that I was linked to written by another psychiatrist that helped inspire me today to write this column. It was back on June 17, 2023, when Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell, MD, MSc, wrote “Taylor Swift Has Rocked My Psychiatric Practice” as a Guest Essay for the New York Times. She discussed the many positive psychosocial ramifications of Taylor Swift:

Many of my patients are adolescent girls and young women, and they have leaned on Taylor Swift as a kind of big sister through the daily agonies of being a teenage girl . . .

. . . because she is both the lucky one you want to be and every bit the antihero you are inside.

And yet the Swiftie strives to be the modern-day Cinderella who doesn’t remember if she has a man.

. . . the access she has created to a cohesive community, particularly for the pandemic generation . . .

The exclamation point came when Dr Garfinke-Crowell herself went to one of the shows with her daughter and experienced “Swiftmania.”

To me, Taylor Swift’s personal social influence parallels some of how we think in psychiatry, especially for dynamic and supportive psychotherapy. Just like we do, she has emphasized remembering and reviewing the past because it informs who you are now and will become in the future.

Now, if only there was someone like her for young men. Young men are experiencing increasing stress as their role in society has been changing. If not a male singer/songwriter, how about someone in sports?

I hope my ignorance and prior lack of attention to the Swiftie phenomena isn’t showing up too strongly, but my admiration and gratefulness is clear. In our time of increasing cultish connection to leaders and authority, some might think there is some cultish connections going on, but I see that as more individually and socially therapeutic.

Dr Moffic (he/him/his) is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry, and is now in retirement and refirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.