The tide is turning on Insta-therapy. Good riddance, but actual therapy is still good and worth doing.

If you’ve had a gutsful of therapeutic lingo – “your feelings are valid”, “thank you for holding space”, “I feel seen”, “do the work”, “honour my boundaries”, “Are you in the right headspace to receive information that could possibly hurt you?”, enmeshment, codependence, vulnerability, narcissism, “my trauma”, “my trauma”, “my trauma” – then I have good news for you: the backlash to therapy culture is robust and ascendant. 

This pronouncement is based mostly on me licking my finger and sticking it in the air, but here are some of the breezes I’m feeling: last year, Time Magazine announced that we’d hit “peak therapy” and The London Evening Standard signalled “the end of therapy speak”. Freddie de Boer, a US-based writer who frequently rails against “therapeutic maximalism”, has written about its weakening grip on the culture. Seerut K. Chawla, a London-based psychotherapist who criticises “Insta-therapy”, has a growing following of almost 300,000 people on Instagram. And on our own shores, Dr Jonathan Shedler, a prominent US-based psychoanalyst, went on Kim Hill’s Saturday Morning show last September to discuss the clinical perils of overusing therapy speak. 

My guess is that, taking into account the lagging pace of social change in Aotearoa relative to the rest of the world, we’ll only have to put up with another couple of years of everything being “valid” and “triggering” before we move on to a new post-therapeutic mode of expression. But as Insta-therapy is hosed off our cultural house, trickling down the same drain as lolcats and ban-men feminism, I am here to make one plea: don’t let the backlash to therapy culture stop you from doing therapy. 

I can’t wait to see the back of therapy culture. The problems with it are numerous and well articulated by critics like Chawla and deBoer, but in short, therapy culture encourages a person to revel in the status of victimhood; to see their mental health problems as a core part of their identity rather than challenges to overcome; and to hold the people around them (and the world more generally) responsible for meeting their needs and keeping them safe. Therapy culture breeds snowflakes and crybullies, and its preferred parlance is like an email from HR: saccharine and earnest, but also vaguely threatening. 

But as Chawla and deBoer are both careful to clarify, therapy culture is not the same thing as therapy. Often, the two are more like opposites. Therapy is a private encounter between patient and professional, whereas therapy culture plays out on social media. Therapy is about overcoming difficulty; therapy culture is about claiming the mantle of victimhood. Therapy has room for complexity, nuance and contradiction; therapy culture needs to fit inside a bullet-pointed Instagram carousel. Therapy encourages you to find an internal locus of control; therapy culture tells you what the world should do for you. Therapy doesn’t proselytise; therapy culture never shuts up. 

If you confuse therapy culture for therapy, you will likely run a mile from both. That’s a shame, and a mistake. 

It might feel like we live in a touchy-feely, namby-pamby world where every man and his dog is seeing a shrink, but in reality, the vast majority of people aren’t doing therapy at any given time. Pākehā women were the group with the highest rates of therapy attendance in New Zealand last year, but only 9.7% of them consulted a psychologist or counsellor about mental health issues from June 2022 to June 2023, according to Ministry of Health data. For Pacific men it was 2.4%, and for Asian women 1.7%. (We aren’t an outlier: US data from 2019 showed that 11.7% of women participated in counselling or therapy compared to 7.2% of men.)

Zoom out from therapy culture, and you’ll see that it’s a blip. Preceding it are decades of beliefs that therapy is for the weak, that therapists are quacks and weirdos, that people should be “man enough” to handle their own problems, and that issues arising in the domestic sphere should be dealt with there and there alone. Recent studies on New Zealanders’ attitudes to therapy are thin on the ground, but a 2021 poll of Americans found that 47% of respondents believe seeking therapy is a sign of weakness. 2021! In America! Maybe the beating heart of therapy culture was flatlining all along.

I worry that the backlash to therapy culture will cause these older beliefs about therapy to strengthen and resurface. Already, the backlash urges people to consider that therapy culture makes you selfish. How many people will hear this as “therapy makes you selfish”? The idea is already deeply embedded in the culture: in the novels of Sigrid Nunez, in the mutterings of mothers, in the shame-riddled patient herself, who can’t overcome the idea that it’s self-indulgent to be on the couch at all. 

This is the truth about therapy: with good faith on the part of the patient and requisite skill on the part of the therapist, therapy makes the patient stronger, less self-absorbed, and more prosocial in the long run. Therapy isn’t for the weak. It requires enormous reserves of courage: hour upon hour of excavating the worst things that have ever happened to you and making sense of their impact isn’t easy, to say the least. Therapy also requires (and begets) humility and a focus on others: the job isn’t done if you don’t move the spotlight from the harms done to you, to the harms you visit on others (and yourself). Therapy promotes personal responsibility and growth.

Remember this as it becomes increasingly unfashionable to talk about “holding space”, “being triggered” and “feeling seen”. Don’t confuse therapy (good) with therapy culture (good riddance). Don’t throw the boundaries out with the bathwater.