The religion of therapy culture— the idea that having a therapist is a prerequisite to being a functioning person and that talking to friends about life’s troubles is an excessive emotional burden— has been among the most destructive forces in American society. Whenever you have a problem of any kind these days, the first piece of advice people offer is to give money to a stranger with a license and to talk to this professional about your life. Sometimes this is the appropriate response to life’s adversities. If you experienced some traumatic event, can’t function as a normal person in quotidian life, or suspect you have a psychological condition that requires expert knowledge to accommodate, then it behooves you to seek credentialed psychiatric care. It’s probably even advisable to see such a professional if you’re facing difficulties in adjusting to a new circumstance that appears to be thwarting your mental condition. However, there arises a point at which it’s evident that such a solution is insufficient and could in fact hold you hostage to the ultimate causes of your problems.
The purpose of therapy is to teach the patient to have a healthy response to his troubles so that the unhealthy responses he had had prior to treatment don’t cause him to malfunction. For example, someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) might be unable to watch a movie in the theater comfortably because he fears the possibility that a gunman will enter the room and shoot him and other audience members. This is an intrusive thought or obsession. He may know that the probability of this occurring is infinitesimally small but because he can’t be certain that it won’t transpire, he can’t feel at ease whenever he’s seeing a film at the cinema. As a consequence, he develops zany rituals to reassure himself that he’ll be safe, but these habits only reinforce his anxiety. He might sit near the edge of the row so that he can make a hasty escape, or he might avoid eating or drinking so that he’ll be less auditorily detectable. These are compulsions. Someone who behaves like this ought to consult with a psychologist who understands the patient’s behavioral patterns and can recommend steps to overcome the cycle of compulsive routines that operate as a reinforcing feedback loop for the intrusive thought.
Similarly, someone who survived a traumatic event that haunts him should obtain support from a psychologist. As an example, one of my great uncles turned his head during the Battle of Saipan, and a bullet slashed the back of his neck. For the rest of his life, he constantly thought about the fact that had he not turned his head, he would’ve been killed. As a result, he rarely exited his apartment and worked from home (this is before the internet enabled at-home jobs to proliferate). The failure to attain professional assistance in analogous scenarios can lead not only to unhealthy but even tragic outcomes. For instance, the Oklahoma City bomber appeared to have been psychologically scarred from the Gulf War, which led him to obsess over the moral shortcomings of the US government to the point that he murdered hundreds of innocent civilians in America’s worst act of terror prior to 9/11. Clearly, he should’ve sought or been provided with psychiatric care.
Even relatively trivial episodes of distress can prompt dysfunctional coping mechanisms in certain people. An individual with just the right brew of underlying personality traits may be unable to naturally deal with circumstances that are an ineluctable part of life. Some people might, as an example, be incapable of functioning after losing a family member or living through a period of emotional abuse. Such individuals should speak with a professional who’s experienced with these sorts of predicaments. The litmus test for whether you ought to do so is if you’re having difficulty responding to something outside your control without disrupting your life or subjective well-being.
This is all to say that I don’t oppose finding a psychological professional. In fact, I recommend at least testing it out for a few months if you feel troubled even if you’re not sure whether your problem passes the above litmus test. I’m no expert, so it’s better to err on the side of caution and speak with someone who is, just to be confident whether it’s the correct solution. Having established this, it seems to me that society has overprescribed therapists to a detrimental degree.
Sometimes the underlying cause of a person’s meaninglessness isn’t that the person has maladaptive responses to adversity but rather lacks a proper human ecosystem. Humans are social animals, and we exist as persons—that is, as self-conscious agents with a concept of the future. We’re only persons in relation to each other, not on our own. In the Hebrew creation story, Adam is created as a one-of-a-kind organism in a garden of non-human animals whom he gets to name. His naming the other animals in the garden indicates that he is apart from them due to a qualitative barrier in their natures. God creates Eve to be a proper and complimentary companion to Adam. The two are fashioned in their Creator’s image, and this nature can only be fully expressed in relation to their Creator and to each other.
The Biblical myth suggests that even in a world perfectly engineered by God Almighty that is—at that stage— devoid of wickedness and malfunction, people can’t live fully in isolation. This fact is even more pronounced in an atheistic world, for Adam could at least have a relationship with God in the absence of others of his kind. In an intrinsically purposeless world, fulfillment must be carved out of an otherwise meaningless reality. To do this requires us to either live for an objective in the future or to live for each other. The latter is a more enduring source of life satisfaction than the former for most (maybe even all) of us.
If friendship and love aren’t your jam, then career objectives are your most plausible means of uncovering purpose in life. Imagining a place where you’d like to be professionally in the future and devising a plan to reach it can provide a drive and a meaningful task to accomplish. This sense of mission might lack the seeming permanence of interpersonal relations, but it sets a raison d’ être for the time being.
Without genuine interpersonal connections or a personal destiny with a plan to realize it, life can feel pointless as if there’s nothing more to it than to consoom product and get excited for next product. George Berkeley wrote that “Esse est percipi” on the grounds that external objects only exist as long as we (or God) perceive(s) their qualities subjectively since everything is just a collection of properties. I propose the reverse in regards to meaning: we can only perceive a reason to live if in fact such a reason exists.
Consequently, paying to sit on a couch and talk about your life with a stranger every week won’t resolve people’s meaninglessness if their meaninglessness is due to social privation or occupying professional no man’s land. As previously stated, the function of a therapist is to teach the patient to accept things as they are and to respond to them in ways that don’t generate or reinforce unhealthy behaviors or thought patterns. In the absence of social or professional fulfillment, it’s counterproductive to accept your situation and to train yourself to think your circumstances are acceptable. Instead, you need to rely on people who are genuinely a part of your life, and if they don’t yet exist, go find them.
To accommodate what is objectively an unhealthy environment for a human to live in is a betrayal of your duty to yourself. As I’ve written about elsewhere, certain non-human animals have been documented in suicidal acts. Cetaceans in captivity are fed well and engage in physical activity, yet there have been instances in which they’ve appeared to have deliberately ended their own lives. It’s ridiculous to expect for a dolphin to adapt to inhabiting a pool with a couple others when it should be with a pod out in the open ocean. Likewise, it’s a farce to expect someone to be satisfied with life if he’s solitary and stuck in a professional dead-end; a therapist isn’t going to be his friend or map a career plan. Just as the captive orca will be incapable of healthy mental function when trapped in a man-made ecosystem no matter how well-fed and clean, a normal human will be unable to have a balanced state of mind in the absence of a pod or a future to strive for even if he has access to modern opulence that would’ve been inconceivable to King Solomon.
Therefore, we should encourage and help each other to get into the open ocean with a pod. “Get help” is, no matter how well-intentioned, sometimes the wrong advice. General Milley caught flack for stating that every squad has a behavioral health specialist and that that specialist is the squad leader. This couldn’t be more correct, and it’s a shame that this was a controversial statement. For thousands of years people have relied on their family, friends, and religious community for support, and now that’s considered a burden even when the problem is ecological rather than subjective. For the health of society and of individual people, therapy shouldn’t be prescribed as the solution to every problem in life.
This is a thoughtful article and interesting topic for discussion. I agree with the main thrust, albeit with a reframe.
Obviously, therapy isn't the solution to all of life's problems. I don't think anyone would disagree with that. Is it over- or under-prescribed? That's reasonable to debate. I also think it's reasonable to debate whether "therapy culture" at large, distinct from actual therapy (think: TikTok gurus), is positive or negative. My own view is that therapy is generally positive and more people would benefit from it than have access to it. I am pro-therapy. Also - using the army as a supportive example of what you want to see doesn't make sense considering their suicide problem. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/19/magazine/suicide-military-austin-valley.html. I'm sympathetic, though, to ways that "therapy culture" is noxious.
That being said, there is an important deeper issue you are touching on. In some cases, people go to therapy seeking things that our existing culture and institutions are failing to provide. Therapy is not a substitute for fraternal spaces, fellowship, intermediating institutions, and the like. A steelman of your argument is that therapy is an easy go-to answer that perhaps inhibits us from facing these harder institutional and cultural issues.
My gentle reframe is a "yes and." Presenting this as implicitly zero-sum will result in people litigating therapy. Instead, I think the answer is: Do both. Go to therapy and also understand its limitations. AND, in the mean time, let's collectively address the institutional and cultural voids in a world that is rapidly changing, the voids causing many of our issues. Which begs the question: What would it look like to do this? Exploring this question, rather than litigating mental health, is where I believe this conversation can become very productive.
“you need to rely on people who are genuinely a part of your life, and if they don’t yet exist, go find them.”
If only there was some kind of sage who could help me troubleshoot the ineffective strategies for relating to others that I have developed as a symptom of being raised in a culture defined by separation, isolation, and lack. The inept strategies for compromising, communicating and collaborating that have contributed to my continued isolation by pushing people away or inspiring me to flee. And maybe we could come up with a licensing system so I don’t get taken advantage of by a stranger claiming wisdom but recruiting for some freaky cult….😅
But seriously, I agree theres a problem here. Just like putting up a fence and charging people to use your “property” detached people from collaborating in the physical commons, there has been a kind of enclosure of those social commons in which we’d have traditionally found both friends and wise elders. After all a therapist is basically a village elder with a degree that hopefully means they’re good at it.
And yeah, maybe a lot of therapists suck. But based on everything you’ve written here, I think we’re on the same team and I feel pretty strongly that it would be more efficacious to point these high caliber analytical guns at forces that *aren’t* ostensibly working to alleviate suffering, promote awakening, and reduce unskillful, ineffective and unhealthy behavior…
In answer to your opening statement (what a hook!) surely there is something that hasn’t done *any* good that can claim the title of Worst Thing Ever, right?