Is Therapy Culture Reinforcing Harmful Narratives?
When two delusions meet for 50 minutes
Therapy has become America's new religion, with counseling offices as ubiquitous as coffee shops and mental health advice flowing endlessly through social media feeds. This therapeutic gospel - a potent mix of pop psychology, pseudoscience, and oversimplified diagnosis - has created a culture of dependency masquerading as self-improvement. While traditional therapy served those in crisis, today's therapy culture transforms ordinary human struggles into pathologies requiring professional intervention. The result? An epidemic of iatrogenic harm hidden behind promises of healing and growth.
Picture a fresh-faced therapist, one of countless graduates still paying off their Master's degree, sitting across from their client. Their eyes shine with rehearsed empathy, head nodding with the mechanical precision of a dashboard ornament. They've mastered the therapeutic buzzwords: "holding space," "validating experiences," and "meeting clients where they are." Yet too often, "where they are" hovers somewhere between creative fiction and an alternate reality, with neither therapist nor client recognizing the gulf between performative healing and genuine transformation.
Through years of supervising new therapists, I've witnessed a recurring pattern. It begins innocently: a client weaves their narrative of emotional wounds and relationships, and the therapist accepts this story as gospel truth. While life's challenges are undeniably real, the stories we craft about them become either catalysts for transformation or toxic scripts that breed self-loathing, misery, and fractured relationships.
Within weeks, every challenge becomes "trauma" requiring healing, and normal emotions morph into "my depression" - as if it were an alien invader traced to the clinical label "major depressive disorder." The therapist, swept along by this expanding narrative, validates not just the client's experience but the diagnostic framework that transforms human struggle into medical conditions requiring professional intervention.
The real tragedy? These stories become self-fulfilling prophecies. She's so convinced he's emotionally withholding that she interprets his every sigh as an act of psychological warfare. He's so certain she's trying to control him that he sees her every suggestion as a power play. She withdraws because "he's impossible to talk to." He stays late at work because "she'll criticize everything anyway." She documents his "narcissistic behaviors" in her Notes app. He vents about her "emotional manipulation" to his friends. Their narratives become armor, their stories become weapons, and key relationships a battlefield where both sides are fighting enemies that exist only in their minds.
Meanwhile, our fresh-faced therapist, armed with three chapters of their trauma textbook and a Twitter thread about "toxic relationships," is ready to diagnose the people they never met with every personality disorder in the DSM-5, plus a few they're probably inventing for the DSM-6. Never mind that client’s tend to leave out the part where they threw the TV remote through a window because their partner breathed too loudly during "This Is Us."
Fast forward six months. Our client has graduated from "going through a rough patch" to "Major Depressive Disorder, Moderate - DSM-5 Code: 296.22." Her story has been professionally edited, peer-reviewed, and now comes with an insurance-billable diagnosis. The therapist, proud of their "clinical assessment skills," has helped their client "gain clarity" – which really means they've co-written a psychological thriller where escape is the only possible happy ending.
The therapist never considers that they're watching their client's mind perform its greatest magic trick – turning ordinary life challenges into a highlight reel of calculated psychological warfare. Yes, there's probably much truth sprinkled in there – just enough reality to make the story stick. But what's lost in all the validation and careful case conceptualization is something far more important: understanding how the mind can write, direct, and star in its own tragedy, then sell tickets to the show.
The client leaves each session more convinced of her depression, more certain of her meaningless marriage, more attached to her narrative of victimhood. The therapist adds another note to the case file, proud of helping their client "see the truth" about her situation. Neither of them realizes they've just been binge-watching the same dark series together, confusing their shared viewing experience for reality.
The solution? Maybe we need to start every therapy session with a disclaimer: "Warning: All narratives shared in this room may be products of our collective imagination.”
Imagine if mental health professionals could see the director's cut of their clients' stories – complete with deleted scenes, alternative endings, and behind-the-scenes commentary. That carefully curated tale of marital woe and horror stories about their boss? It's gone through more rewrites than a Hollywood blockbuster, each version tweaked for maximum impact, each scene polished to shine the spotlight directly on our client's preferred version of events. But 99% of practitioners are sitting there, notepad in hand, treating these narrative highlight reels like documentary footage.
And why wouldn't they? They're trapped in their own mind-Matrixes too, complete with their own carefully constructed beliefs about what constitutes "mental illness." They've got their DSM dogmas, their therapeutic theories, their Instagram-influenced ideologies about what healing should look like. They're watching a movie inside a movie inside a movie, like Inception but with better insurance coverage.
Meanwhile, technology has turned our minds into 24/7 content creation studios. We're no longer just thinking – we're producing, directing, and streaming our personal narratives in real-time, with push notifications. Our ancestors were too busy running from actual predators to live-tweet their trauma responses. They didn't have time to psychoanalyze their relationship with the neighboring cave clan – they were focused on not becoming dinner for a predator animal or making sure their crops can survive the winter.
But evolution hasn't caught up with our new reality. Our brains, these magnificent meat computers running on software from the Paleolithic era, are desperately trying to process 2024's information overload with stone-age hardware. So what does our mind do? It creates threats where none exist. Can't find a saber-toothed tiger to flee from? No problem! Here's some existential dread about that slightly awkward pause in yesterday's Zoom meeting. No actual predators around? Cool, cool – let's obsess about our Instagram engagement rates dropping by 0.3%.
We've gone from "Is that rustling in the bushes going to eat me?" to "Is my therapist's slight head tilt indicating that my childhood was more traumatic than I thought?" Our minds, bored with the relative safety of modern life, have become Hollywood studios specializing in psychological horror films, each one starring ourselves as both victim and villain.
And now, thanks to social media and the mental health industrial complex, we've got a constant stream of confirmation for whatever story we're telling ourselves. Your partner didn't text back for three hours? Here's seventeen TikToks about attachment trauma.
Feeling tired after a long day? Here's a Twitter thread about how fatigue is actually your inner child crying for attention.
Liked organizing your sock drawer? Congratulations, six different YouTube therapists are ready to diagnose you with OCD.
The mental health professionals who should be our reality check are often just as lost in the narrative maze. They're nodding along, validating our validations of our validations, like some sort of therapeutic Russian nesting doll. They're prescribing medications based on stories that have been through more filters than an Instagram influencer's selfie.
We're all out here playing telephone with reality, each retelling getting more distorted, each diagnosis getting more certain, each story becoming more "real" with every therapeutic head nod. And the scariest part? This isn't a glitch in the Matrix – it's the entire operating system.
At least our ancestors had the luxury of their delusions being limited by the physical world. Our modern minds have unlimited data plans and premium subscriptions to every streaming service of suffering available. We're not just thinking anymore – we're binge-watching our own designer delusions in 4K HDR.
Here's the punchline that nobody wants to hear: The real mental illness isn't your anxiety, your depression, or even that personality disorder your last therapist casually dropped into conversation. The real mental illness is our white-knuckled grip on the stories our minds create. It's our desperate need to believe that our mental movie reel is an accurate documentary rather than what it really is – our mind's best attempt at making sense of a chaotic world.
The true dysfunction isn't in having these thoughts, these stories, these elaborate mental productions. That's just what minds do – they're meaning-making machines, running 24/7 like Netflix servers, constantly streaming content we never asked for.
No, the dysfunction lies in our refusal to see them as what they are: stories. Just stories. Not prophecies. Not absolute truths. Not life sentences. Just stories our minds are telling, as compelling and as fictitious as any bestseller.
Will your mind stop producing content? Of course not. That's its job. But maybe – just maybe – we can all stop being such devoted fans of our own mental drama series. Maybe we can learn to sit in the audience instead of getting dragged onto the stage.
We're just the awareness watching it all unfold.
But try telling that to Dr. Mitchell, who's already reaching for his prescription pad after hearing your 15-minute highlight reel about feeling "stuck" your “anxiety”. He's got a story about why you need Lexapro, based on his story about your story, which is based on a story you crafted in the Uber on the way to his office.
We're all living in our own mental movie. Some of us just have the power to medicate the plot lines.
The true path to mental wellbeing isn't found in endlessly dissecting our trauma narratives or collecting diagnostic labels. It emerges when we learn to observe our minds with clarity, choosing to live fully despite our stories of limitation.
The most powerful therapy is the decision to love deeply, embrace our values, and step into life's possibilities. Yet our minds, addicted to the neurochemical rush of drama and suffering, resist this simple wisdom. Modern therapy culture, rather than breaking this cycle, often reinforces it - keeping us tethered to old stories instead of writing new ones.
The question isn't "What's wrong with me?" but rather "Who do I choose to become?"
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Thank you for this! I have so much to say about this (and I’m not a psychologist or psychiatrist so I neither prescribe medication nor diagnose), but I see so many of my (mostly psychotherapy) clients who are supporting themselves between sessions with podcasts and social media, and sometimes the impression they get (in addition to diagnosing themselves and everyone else in the world), is that there are instant fixes, that solutions are simple, and worse, if they follow the suggestion of an influencer and don’t see a shift immediately then they are the ones who are broken, and then of course they come to the session almost with the expectation that I might waive a magic wand in the same kind of soundbite time-limited manner they see on social media. I have seen a huge change in the past ten years in terms of clients expectations.
I found myself nodding along with this as it highlights so much of what we see around us while working in this sector. The powerful totalising narratives, medicalised, reductionist and giant corporate interests driving so much harm in the name of good.
This all filters down to us the human beings or in this world ‘consumers’ and we absorb and repeat and are given scraps from the table when these narratives and framings are used as currency in the form of reasonable adjustments in the disordered school, the disordered work place, driven by a range of cultural disorders you outlined so well.
However the final paragraph rings hollow to me or at best wishful thinking. The Russian dolls analogy you use is useful here - how does the smallest doll break out of its nested, cultural disorders and just decide to ‘love deeply’ and ‘embrace our values’.
This is the sort of heroic individualism that is also part of the problem that industry trades on and often drives people into the mental ill health industry due to its false advertising and fake claims of robust evidence basses and its routine ignoring of the harms some of which you outlined above.
Given we do not ‘choose’ to marinade from birth to death in the myriad cultural disorders you outlined and many more, how do we stand in the face of this and just ‘choose to become’ something else. This sounds like the basis for the super hero movies also ubiquitous in the culture, the story of the underdog striking out in the face of overwhelming odds, the self creating, self maximising self self self.
Therapy at least here in the UK is ran via Talking Therapies formerly IAPT and its all short term, medical model driven, tock box, brief ‘symptoms’ reduction, based on vacuous conceptions of ‘recovery’ that is essentially a score on the drug company produced PHQ9 and GAD7. The entire system is a one of internalising, pathologising and fosters illusions of heroic individualism.
We have no time to listen to the narrative weaves of bias and distortions and explore or unpack them and even if we did we are doing this with the client alone and so have no way to test what is being said against any broader reality of the client and their relations or context. Research shows millions of people don’t have a few hundred saved for emergency’s , millions have no one they can call a friend, inequality is out of control, we’re drowning in labels and drugs, prescribed and otherwise - to live in accord with values requires resources that many if not most do not have, to love requires the experiences of love and many are living through a love disguised as terrible pain, violence, indifference, neglect, all driven by a range of cultural disorders. In other words to pull yourself up by the boot straps requires boots, straps and favourable life growing cultural conditions.
Many in the therapy industry are burning out along with everyone else - see this work on the UK IAPT, now talking therapies.
https://thefutureoftherapy.org/