Has Therapy (Culture) Gone Too Far?
Why soundbites and quick fixes get it wrong—and what good therapy actually offers.
When you get asked to go on NPR, you say yes—even if it’s at 6:45 a.m., you’re not a morning person, and menopause has turned word-finding into a competitive sport you usually lose, even while wide awake.
As a long-time listener of On Point, it was an honor to join Meghna Chakrabarti for the episode Have We Taken Therapy Culture Too Far? The topic: the online trend of self-diagnosing and sometimes over-identifying with trauma or labels. It’s a great episode, worth listening to. Still, because parents often ask me about this, and because you rarely get to say what you fully mean in the bite-sized spaces you’re given to respond on radio, I wanted to expand here.
The conversation was sparked by Freya India’s widely shared piece, “Nobody Has a Personality Anymore.”1 India opens with, “Therapy-speak has taken over our language,” and ends with the provocation that maybe we should stop looking inward altogether. She writes:
“Explain anything long enough and you will find a pathology; dig deep enough and you will disappear. We keep being told that the bravest thing now is to do the work. But I think it takes courage not to explain everything, to release control, to resist that impulse to turn inwards.”
It’s an interesting point. And yet, too often “therapy-speak” and “therapy culture” get mistaken for actual therapy. I said as much in a comment on the piece—and that comment, the one that got the On Point producers’ attention, is still the top comment because it’s gotten a zillion likes (okay about 800). Here’s what I wrote:
It seems important to note that the work of therapy—of good therapy—isn’t to find pathology and disappear. It’s very much the opposite of that. It’s making meaning of your life and your symptoms. It’s about coming to accept your humanness, your humanity, to laugh at your flaws, and get out of your head, finding an internal sense of freedom so that you can engage deeply in relationships.
Therapy-Speak Isn’t Therapy
It’s not that I disagree with India’s premise. There’s far too much self-diagnosing on social media and amateur “therapists” spread misinformation that many teens absorb. Kids seek diagnoses they don’t necessarily have or interpret everything they do and feel through the lens of their diagnoses. I have personally witnessed kids using labels to limit themselves rather than understanding and integrating their diagnoses and traumas.
But when people critique “therapy culture,” I notice two things:
They confuse “doing the work” with diagnosing and symptom-counting.
They romanticize a past when mental health struggles were stigmatized or invisible.
India argues we’ve replaced personality traits and character with diagnoses. She writes, “Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting and secretly loved for never arriving on time, but because of ADHD.”
But the truth is, though, in this culture we don’t actually find people lovably forgetful, adorably shy, or endearingly needy. The early, outgoing, independent bird still gets the worm.
So it makes sense that someone outside those narrow boxes—especially now that social media has brought visibility to other valid ways of being—would reach for explanations. If you’re bright but struggle with grades, always late even when you know you’ll be docked, or feel shut out of friendships no matter how hard you try—who wouldn’t want a framework that helps make sense of that? For young people, especially girls who are given such narrow lanes to inhabit, finding a diagnosis can feel like finally finding a self.
As social media has helped lift the shame of mental health issues, people are freer to talk about theirs. The unfortunate byproduct of that, though, is that complex psychological ideas have been commodified and flattened into memes and 30-second reels. Like most things that fit neatly into trending soundbites, they’ve been cheapened and distorted.
That’s not the result of too much therapy. It’s the result of not enough therapy—or at least not enough good therapy.
Good therapy helps you understand and manage symptoms, decide how much weight to give diagnostic categories, and make meaning of your experiences. It helps transform trauma into resilience, wisdom, and compassion2. Your scars become evidence of what you’ve survived, not a definition of who you are.
India longs for a “simpler way of living” from past generations, when people weren’t overanalyzing life choices. I get it. The endless options we have today are overwhelming and, as she notes, often can’t be calculated or codified. I think about how I tried to be very rational about whether to have children until, finally, I just wanted a baby even though the math on my pro-con list didn’t add up. And yet, I’m deeply grateful that anyone who doesn’t feel that urge, doesn’t have to have children—a freedom that’s only existed in recent generations and is now under dire threat again.
That’s why romanticizing the past, when people didn’t know—or weren’t allowed to know—why they made major life decisions, is misleading. That wasn’t simplicity. It was constraint, especially for women.
Being self-reflective is not the same thing as being self-absorbed.
Where mental health treatment has gone wrong
While I find the critiques of “therapy in this country” overreaching, they’re not completely wrong. In recent decades, insurance companies—often in step with the pharmaceutical industry—have pushed therapists to treat symptoms rather than the whole person. That drive for efficiency and profit has trickled down to therapy training programs, treatment models, and, yes, likely contributed to individuals who identify as their symptoms and diagnoses.
But that isn’t what therapy is meant to be. Therapy is listening, attunement, human care. In a culture shaped by individualism and the worship of positive emotions, therapy offers something different: the space to put words to sorrow in the presence of someone else. It is permission to think the unthinkable and say the unsayable, so that pain can be transformed rather than left to fester and be acted out on others.
Critics like to call therapy “wallowing,” but the opposite is true. Indeed, one of the most valuable lessons I gained from therapy is that frustration and suffering are human—a natural part of life, like cloudy days that come and go. My psychoanalytic therapist, who made room for all of my feelings, also used to say: “Who said it would be easy?” or “Why’d you think you’d be good at that right away?”
Over the last few decades, so-called evidence-based therapies—essentially a marketing term to elevate quick, cheap, behavioral fixes—have increasingly sidelined relationship-based, depth-oriented work. To satisfy insurers’ bottom lines and academia’s demand for measurable outcomes, treatments became short-term, manualized, and symptom-focused—easier to study in a lab, but detached from the messy realities of human lives.
These approaches place the problem at the center, not the person. That might work for a broken bone or a blood sugar imbalance, but it doesn’t for emotional pain. We just can’t separate our psyches from our injuries. Human misery is less about what we have and more about who we are. The focus of most effective therapists I know go far beyond symptoms and diagnoses.
The irony is that therapies sometimes dismissed as “unscientific”—the ones that focus on feelings, trauma, and relationships—are backed by evidence showing not only symptom relief but deeper, lasting changes. They take longer, yes, and they cost more, but they offer transformation rather than temporary fixes. Research also shows that in-depth psychotherapy reduces health care costs by lowering hospital admissions, medical visits, and missed workdays. Yet because those long-term benefits don’t show up on an insurance company’s quarterly balance sheet, longer therapies rarely get covered.
Psychotherapy is the least invasive treatment we have for human suffering, and it accounts for a tiny fraction of healthcare costs. Yet it faces more regulation and oversight than almost any other area of medicine. Why? Because it serves the financial interests of both insurers and pharmaceutical companies to redefine “mental health care” as either prescribing pills or offering the cheapest, briefest forms of therapy.
We should be up in arms, demanding better. Instead we settle for McTherapy—or social media “therapy”—because they fit the cultural zeitgeist of busyness and convenience.
Why Looking Inward Still Matters
So in response to the call to stop looking inward, I vehemently disagree. Much of the ugliness we see in the world comes from the fact that we rarely do the inner work. Self-reflection—especially with the help of a skilled therapist—isn’t indulgence; it’s essential. Done well, it not only eases emotional suffering but helps us be more present, engaged and fully alive. It gives shape to our lives, meaning to our struggles, and a way out of the helplessness so many of us feel—especially our teens.
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In Psychology Today: Why Does Talk Therapy Take So Long? The case for open-ended psychotherapy
Jo-Ann Finkelstein, PhD
I recently said goodbye to a patient I’d seen for six years in my psychotherapy practice. “Doc,” he said, pointedly using the name he’d insisted on for the first two years of treatment, “all those times ... well, I’m glad I stuck with it. I definitely wouldn’t have Jackson,” referring to the adored child he’d sworn early in life never to have. Read full story
The plan was to dig into India’s article, but when she couldn’t join at the last minute, the producers widened the lens and brought in Laura Delano, author of the memoir Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance. It made for a fascinating discussion—though it wasn’t quite the conversation I’d prepared for.
On the show, my morning menopausal brain was searching for the word “integrate” with regard to how we transform trauma but came up with “outgrow” which is not how I actually see it.
