in the movie Midsummer (2019) there is a scene in which the actress Florence Pugh screams and cries inconsolably. The women of the cult she is trapped in kneel beside her to imitate her screams and sobs in unison. In this way they absorb their individual pain and transform it into a communal experience, a shared catharsis. In real life, the closest thing to this experience is Scream Clubs, a new wellness trend that brings together hundreds of people to scream together in a public space. A sort of free therapy in which nothing is needed other than the accumulated frustration. The dynamic is simple: people get together, put an intention into shouting, breathe, shout, release and the body starts again…
“I’m here because I work in the healthcare system”, “I’m here because, as men, we are constantly told that we have to suppress our emotions”, “I’m here because I cry a lot, sometimes I feel very sad during the day and I just wanted to talk to someone and make friends”… you can hear the voices of several people who gathered in London to shout. In just three days, more than 1,000 people joined the call launched on TikTok by a 26-year-old girl, Mona Sharif (she has 21,000 followers on the social network), for a shouting match. The practice was recommended to him by his psychologist in 2023 and, after trying it with a friend in the countryside, it made him feel much better. “People are desperate, they want to talk to someone, they desperately want to find a community. I, who don’t have many followers, have managed to bring together thousands of people with just one video,” the organizer said in an interview with Metro UK last October.
Mona Sherif was inspired by Chicago’s Scream Club, a community founded last June that already has more than 10 chapters in the United States, one in Puerto Rico and another in the United Kingdom, and which has more than 10,000 followers on Instagram. Its founders are Emanuel Hernandez (New Jersey, United States, 41 years old) and Elena Soboleva (Krasnoyarsk, Russia, 35 years old), a couple who, after a bad week, decided to vent their accumulated emotions with a scream. “We were walking and I asked Elena: ‘Do you want to go and scream at the lake?’, and she said to me: ‘Yes, let’s do it. But I’m a little ashamed if there are people around.’ ‘Hey, we’re sorry to bother you, but we’re about to shout. If you want to participate, you’re more than welcome.'” To their surprise, many decided to join. “Some cried, and that’s when Elena and I looked at each other and said, ‘We should start doing this.'”
It’s no coincidence that Hernandez proposed to his screaming girlfriend. He has been practicing the profession for a few years breathing, a mindful breathing technique to relax the nervous system, reduce stress and release emotions. “Breathing puts you in a state of homeostasis, connects you with the other nervous system, the rest and digestion system, and turns off the part of the brain responsible for the ego. For once, the only thing you focus on is breathing,” he says. He conducts therapies of this type and explains the dynamics of group courses: “I’ll start by talking to you about some sensitive things, things to reflect on. Many emotions emerge and, at a certain point, when you’re in that extreme state… the screams come out.”
Shouting to release works. “People feel calmer after doing it,” says Paola Diéguez, a psychologist specializing in Gestalt therapy. “When a person screams, the sympathetic nervous system is activated and at that moment the brain orders the release of adrenaline. Once put into circulation, it allows us to release all the accumulated energy and all the tensions we have in the body. After screaming, the parasympathetic nervous system is activated, which gives us a feeling of relief or relaxation, breathing becomes deeper and slower, the heart rate decreases and we are left with a feeling of emotional tranquility”, he explains.
Behind what appears to be another trend, there is the intention to create a safe space for community and mental health. In Spain, more than 12 million people – 26.2% of the population – turned to a psychologist in 2024, according to a report by Mutua Madrileña on mental health, and the consumption of anxiolytics increased by 18%. Even at this rate, the Spanish population needed mental healthcare and could not access it due to the lack of public healthcare services and the cost of private healthcare.
Hernandez believes the reason his club has gone so viral is because “screaming at the top of your lungs in public is taboo, people don’t usually do that. And the fact that we gave people permission to do that is why it’s so popular.” Soboleva adds: “We want to make sure that what we do is completely intentional. It’s not just about screaming uncontrollably and then going crazy. It’s not even performative: our mission is simply to raise awareness about mental health, because once we explored it, we saw how many people needed this space of liberation.”
The first cry of the club was in June this year and only five people participated, but in the last editions they have gathered up to 200 participants. One of the participants is Maitane López, the Spanish footballer who signed for Atlético de Madrid and who crossed the ocean in 2023 to join the Gotham team from New Jersey and New York. Last September, the player uploaded a video of her experience at the Scream Club to her Instagram profile, where she has more than 92,000 followers. “Imagine having a normal day and wanting to scream, right? Sometimes, when I have a day like this, ‘mosaic’, as I call it, I want to scream. I started looking on the internet and I found a club for people who want to do it, so let’s go and visit it”, begins the coil with more than 45,000 views. “We’re going to stand here and scream,” he says on the shore of Lake Michigan, in the harbor of North Avenue Beach, the place where the Chicago club meets every Sunday to scream. Then, on a piece of biodegradable paper, he writes the intention of the scream and throws it into the water. Hernandez and Soboleva then begin the countdown, “3,2,1… AHHHHHHHH”, one of the three screams they let out together is heard. When they finish, she claps and celebrates with more shouts, but this time with joy: “WOOOOOO!, okay, I love it!”, concludes the player.
The sessions were attended by children from the age of five accompanied by their parents, and men up to 80 years of age. But the couple especially remembers one of the participants, who witnessed about 18 of the 20 organized screams. At the last event, he was seen crying for the first time and he sought comfort in Hernandez’s arms. “This man was actually a musician who initially attended the club because he wanted to work on his voice and vocal chords. But over time it ended up becoming an emotional release therapy,” recalls Soboleva.
“Many times we have stored emotions that we have not been able to express,” explains the psychologist Diéguez in a conversation with this newspaper. “It doesn’t have to be recent, it can be about something that made me angry or hurt months or years ago and, through screaming, you can connect with that feeling and release that emotion that, even if we didn’t express it at the time, remains stored in the body. It also helps with emotional catharsis.”
There are more and more activities to release all the emotions we accumulate daily and leave them for later. Throw axes, destroy objects in a room of anger or screaming are some creative alternatives for those looking for other ways to release stress, anger, tensions… “Without a doubt, there is a lot of skepticism at first, but when people experience it firsthand, they see how transformative it can be and how beneficial it can be for their nervous system,” Soboleva summarizes.
