Creating the ‘NPD woman in the attic’: reality television, therapeutic governance and the psychologization of women’s marital struggles in China

This article examines how psychiatric language is mobilized to psychologize women’s struggles in marriage through the interconnected discourses of Chinese reality television and social media. Focusing on the controversy surrounding Mai Lin, a stay-at-home mother featured in See You Again Season 4, the article analyses how the psychopathological label ‘NPD’ (narcissistic personality disorder) is discursively constructed and circulated across the show’s celebrity observer panel, online commentators, and participatory social media discussions. Drawing on critical analysis of media discourse and scholarship on therapeutic governance in post-socialist China, the analysis shows how (quasi-)psychological vocabularies move across these media sites, becoming detached from their clinical meanings and reconstituted as popular interpretive resources for evaluating women’s experiences in intimate relationships. Rather than functioning as a clinical diagnosis, ‘NPD’ becomes a vernacular label that individualizes and pathologizes women’s marital struggles while obscuring the structural inequalities of patriarchal marriage. I argue that reality television and social media operate together as discursive processes through which therapeutic governance is gendered, encouraging psychological self-management and emotional self-regulation as solutions to women’s hardships in marriage and family. In doing so, the article demonstrates how patriarchal norms are reproduced through popular media by transforming gendered inequalities into individualized psychological deficiencies.