The internet is obsessed with therapy. TikTok therapists go viral for their takes on wellbeing and relationships. Gaslight (gatekeep, girlboss) and trauma have become integral to the vocabularies of the chronically online. Memes about going, or failing to go, to therapy do the rounds every few months with great success (I will literally write an article about therapy instead of going to therapy). And, when individuals are seen as failing their communities, online or offline, the resounding advice always seems to be: go to therapy.
This directive frames therapy as a homogenous concept - a catchall term that's half-advice, half-insult - suggesting to the person it's aimed at that they are flawed in a way only therapy can remedy. The language of therapy is baked into our existence: our employers tell us to access safe spaces and set boundaries, we decry toxic relationships and love-bombing hinge dates. When someone disappoints us we tell them to seek help. The implications are that therapy and the language of psychology can make someone a better person - more moral, ethical, inclined to be on the 'correct' side of online discourse. However, can therapy really do this? And, with all the issues with engaging with therapy and the mental health industry, should we constantly be telling people that therapy will fix them?
Therapy, like all healthcare, involves an inherently imbalanced relationship; the patient is subject to the therapist's assessment of their health, which for mental health issues can be especially subjective, and relies on their therapist to help them through moments of crisis. The mental health industry is also incredibly lucrative and can be as capitalistic and exploitative as any other, as exemplified by the extensive and ongoing BetterHelp scandals. BetterHelp has been accused of charging excessive fees, failing to support clients, and exploitative marketing tactics amongst other failings, yet continues to promote its services across the internet. Companies such as BetterHelp have undoubtedly benefited from the surge in interest in therapy, and have arguably taken advantage of people lacking the knowledge of what to expect from a therapeutic relationship, overcharging and undeserving clients. Taking up the go to therapy advice often requires access and finances, which most people don't have, and runs the risk of defining being a good person based on your ability to access inaccessible, and possibly exploitative, care.
What often gets missed out when discussing therapy online, is the experiences of psychiatric survivors and psychiatric abolition groups, such as the Campaign for Psych Abolition, which actively critiques and opposes the mental health industry. Their insights, often based on their own experiences of abuse in the healthcare system, provide valuable nuance to the idea that therapy can cure all ills. The CPA outlines the development of psychology and psychiatry as intertwined with homophobia, racism, and colonialism, arguing that care should be centred in the community preventatively, rather than in institutions that respond reactively to people in crisis. Considering the go to therapy line in this context, we can risk playing into tropes of ableism and propping up oppressive systems when we put therapy on a pedestal.
Therapy is so often seen in online subcultures as a panacea that can solve all types of mental ailments, and this notion feeds into our modern impulse to self-identify and self-pathologise all kinds of behaviours. TikTok therapists present catchy and simplified versions of complex issues that are utilised in self-diagnosing experiences, such as mental illnesses and neurodivergence. There is a mixed blessing in this education: it enables people who do not have access to appropriate healthcare to understand their experiences better and support their wellbeing; however, it also allows us to increasingly pathologise every behaviour we perceive as atypical.
Marginalised people are perhaps more aware of the slippery slope of pathology than others - queer people, people of colour, disabled people, and women have all been subjected to their existences being medicalised as an illness or problem to be solved through medical intervention. Think hysteria, mass sterilisations, freak shows, and the fact that homosexuality was only removed from the DSM (the standard for classifying mental disorders) in 1974. The science and research that therapy is built on are not perfect, no research is entirely objective or accurate. In fact, there's no evidence that everyone benefits from therapy, and research is often skewed to ignore negative effects. There's no guarantee that your therapeutic experience is going to be productive or valuable; instead, therapy can sometimes further existing oppression, placing the blame for institutional issues on individuals not 'working on themselves'.
It's convenient to tell people to go to therapy, and so put the burden of their perceived misbehaviour on an imaginary therapist who will fix them. However, there are often more complex issues at play that funnel into oppressive systems that individual therapy will not resolve. Look at last year’s controversy regarding Jonah Hill and his use of therapy speak in abusive messages sent to his then-partner Sarah Brady. In leaked texts, Hill was shown to utilise the language of boundaries and triggers to manipulate Brady into conforming to restrictive behaviours such as not interacting with other men or women he deemed inappropriate. By using language associated with therapy, abuse of power was justified as self-care, for Hill’s sake, and his behaviour justified by his supporters as for his mental health, disregarding Brady’s own. Therapy here can perhaps be seen as doing more harm than good, providing someone with the tools to engage in misogynistic abuse rather than preventing it. By placing all the focus of wellbeing on the individual to fix themselves, we risk ignoring how oppression is baked into our sense of self and experiences of mental illness. Therapy should not be used as a weapon for either side of political debates or issues of ethics; like any medical treatment, it's neutral until taken up and shaped by individuals bringing their own experiences and biases with them.
The idea of working on yourself that often accompanies calls for therapy centres the individual over the community. Friends beg boundaries when they refuse to listen to a story about a bad day or difficult experience, and in doing so, they lose out on real human intimacy in favour of the power-imbalanced doctor’s office. Community and intimacy risk being outsourced to medical companies as we tell people to go to therapy instead of seeking out support amongst our peers. We don’t necessarily need to go all-in on psychiatry abolition in our analysis of therapy in popular culture, however, we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to the abuses that regularly take place in the mental health industry. Before telling people to go to therapy, consider the watered-down message this sends: that if you are hurting, you must immediately pathologize your experience instead of considering the wider context of how your experience interrelates with others and the communities you are a part of.
Therapy won’t make the world an equitable utopia, and sending all our villains to therapy won’t turn them into good people. Rather than tell everyone to go to therapy, perhaps we should consider how cultures of oppression and the communities that perpetuate them thrive, and how we can prevent mental health crises rather than try to fix them once they’ve started. No medical treatment works for everyone, and therapy won’t save us from ourselves, however much we tell others it will.
edited by Madison Challis
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