If you are roughly in the same demographic as me, you probably get lots of ads trying to sell you therapy. Those ads come in various shapes and sizes, and they promise a lot. One tells me that therapy can help me work longer hours. Another ad promises that therapy can help me choose the important things in life. Yet another tells me that therapy “can help [me] work through anything.” Indeed, another goes as far as to say that “everyone should be in therapy” and that the speaker has been going to therapy since the age of six. No wonder, given its supposed omnipotent powers. 

None of those claims are true. Therapy, rather than a cure, has become a sickness; the nadir of the over-medicalisation of everyday life.

The therapy sector is, of course, not the only sector to engage in “hard sell” marketing tactics or to be libertine with the truth. It does, however, play into a trend. You may be familiar with the meme “Men will literally [insert joke here] instead of going to therapy” — the implication being that more men should be in therapy. And more men are going to therapy. In 2020-21, 1.02 million Britons were referred to therapy. In 2022-23, that number rose to 1.76 million; a 73 per cent increase in just two years. 

Of course, those people are not being referred to without a reason — they genuinely think they are sick. To claim Personal Independence Payments (PIPs), you are currently allowed to self-refer, so long as you think you have a condition that means you have difficulties with everyday tasks. This makes the number of people applying for PIPs a good indicator of how many people think they actually suffer from a serious condition. And the number of persons applying for PIPs for mental health conditions has quadrupled since 2016; from under 5,500 a month in 2016 to over 20,000 a month in 2024 thus far.

The previous Government tried to reform the PIP system, with one of the proposed changes being that, instead of cash payments, PIP recipients suffering from mental health problems would receive vouchers for talking therapy. But therapy is often not the answer to those people’s problems. The solution to being dissatisfied with working too few hours is not to seek the help of a healthcare professional — one would be better off spending the time skilling up. 

Therapy is also not going to tell you what the important things in life are. That task would be better left to a philosopher. A friend of mine who studied philosophy and had an interest in the philosophy of religion once fell into serious depression, driven by a paralysing fear of going to hell. He sought the help of a therapist, who just told him that hell does not exist and he should distract himself from thinking about it. The therapist’s refusal to take the potential reality of hell seriously only made my friend’s condition worse. He ended up instead talking to a Benedictine priest, who was able and willing to challenge my friend’s notions of reality rather than simply distract him from them. The theologian ended up being the cure — not the therapist.

Distraction from one’s worries is often the go-to tactic of therapists. I have been to therapy a couple of times myself. My experience was mixed. One time, I felt gaslit — whenever I was overtaken by genuine paralysing anxiety, my therapist suggested, I should employ distraction techniques she taught me. But my anxieties were real — I did not want to be distracted from them, I just wanted to be able to manage them without being paralysed. The process was designed to make me feel what I wanted to feel rather than what feelings were true to the situation I found myself in. This is why therapists can get away with “helping” you choose the important things in life. The process would not be about discovering what things are truly important — rather, it would be about convincing you that the things you want to be important really are important, often by distracting you from any qualms you might have about those things.

Another time I was in therapy, I was assigned to a therapist who kept asking me what I feel. I felt sad at the time, so I told her as much. She would ask me what I wanted to do about it. I said that if I knew I would not have to go to therapy. Eventually she gave up on me — she told me that therapy is about guiding me through what I think and feel, and not about telling me what she thinks. But I was not looking to have my own feelings or thoughts confirmed. I was looking to change them, and I suspect many people with mental health problems do too.

Therapy can be useful. After some bad experiences, I was eventually assigned a good therapist — whose techniques were self-admittedly unorthodox – who challenged my feelings rather than just distracting me from them.

It is a symptom of the over-medicalisation of everyday life

However, suggesting that “everyone should be in therapy” is ridiculous. It puts therapists in situations they are unqualified to handle, like the therapist who did not understand that people can have rational fears about hell, or the therapist who just wanted me to forget about the things that made me anxious rather than help me not be paralysed while I remember them. It is a symptom of the over-medicalisation of everyday life. Therapy has subsumed every life problem under its umbrella and made it a medical one. But not every problem is a medical problem, and so not every problem can be solved by a healthcare professional — and especially not a therapist.

What is more, pushing people who do not need therapy into it deprives help from those who genuinely need it. I do not want to give the impression that all therapy is useless: there are many different kinds of therapy, and my criticisms do not apply to all of them — and even when they do, some people do genuinely need to be distracted from their irrational fears and worries.

Indeed, in many cases, therapy is an essential service. Almost 7,000 people die of suicide in England and Wales every year, and the waiting list for therapy can be as long as five months — much too long for somebody who just suffered a personal tragedy. If fewer people wanted to be in therapy because it is part of their “self-care” routine — as another ad tells me — those who really need help could perhaps get it before it is too late.