My most ‘boomer’ opinion is that therapy-speak has had its day. There’s a strange set of words which have permeated popular culture and many facets of life.
I, personally, would liken those words and their underlying ideology to a creeping ivy on an old building. Something that looks quaint and occasionally quite pretty. Something alluring in doses, but innocently poisonous, and dangerous once its roots get too deep into the foundations of a structure.
Therapy speak seemed to go viral in the early 2010s, and took hold in the 2020s. This is how the doctrine plays out:
If someone disagrees with you, they’re gaslighting. If a relationship has friction, it’s toxic. Anyone inconvenient is a narcissist. Every negative experience is trauma. Refusing any request can be explained as setting boundaries.
This isn’t an ‘anti-woke’ tirade, but it is odd that words which once had clinical meanings have become moral weapons and convenient conversation-enders; bludgeons dutifully deployed at a moments notice to claim moral high ground and disperse disagreement.
New cathedrals
There is, beneath the magic words, all the apparent structure of a religion.
Original sin is intergenerational trauma. You’re damaged from birth, through no fault of your own. SSRIs are communion wafers – the sacred substances offering metaphysical transformation. Therapists serve as confession booths, where you ritually purify yourself through regular sessions. “Have you tried therapy?” is the innocuous evangelism, converting wretched souls to the good word.
When you hear someone in public talk about ‘doing the work’ they make an invisible sign of the cross. This is the signal of purity. Working on yourself. Trying to heal.
None of these things, in themselves, should be derided. Of course we should all be striving for our betterment.
But going to therapy isn’t really a sign of anything. No psychologist can offer moral absolution. They can give comforting words or prescribe comforting pills, but they can’t do the hard part of making your life better; of making you good.
And then there’s the thing nobody wants to say: many causes of depression are environmental and situational, and we bring the situation on ourselves.
The walking dead
On occasion, I find myself in the corner of a dark maze. A place easily stumbled into, and doubly hard to escape. But the path there is simple. I know it intimately and forget it frequently. Here’s a good recipe for a bad time:
I stay in one room. I work all day with the window shut. I get little exercise. Some of this feels hard to avoid in an oft dark and rainy country like England. But it is not unavoidable.
Once those conditions are set, if I have an unproductive day, I feel awful. And I suffocate under the weight of the most menial tasks. Every trivial activity becomes a Sisyphean one; a rock I must pull up a hill so that birds may peck out my eyes.
Many of us are plagued by creeping dread and nebulous darkness. But a small part of us knows that 70% of it could be fixed with fresh air, exercise, and community.
Research shows exercise is as effective as SSRIs for moderate depression. And dancing is even better than exercise.
The things that work have always worked. And we’ve lost them because we remove them.
Sunlight, social connection, meaningful work, proper sleep – these all have massive impact on mental health. But today, they also require effort, agency, lifestyle change, and responsibility.
Therapy and medication offer something easier: external intervention. Something done TO you rather than BY you. Passive consumption rather than active transformation. Validation of your current state rather than a challenge to change it. And crucially – moral credit for “seeking help.”
It’s easy to invoke words that pathologise the basic human experience.
Your shyness is a “social anxiety disorder.” Childhood energy is an “ADHD epidemic.” Winter sadness becomes “clinical depression.” Your flitter of nerves before presentations is an attack of “generalised anxiety.”
If every negative emotion gets diagnosed, we’ve medicalised being human.
Thomas Szasz argued in 1961 that psychiatry was becoming a secular religion. It’s said again today.
I often have to remind myself that others have struggled with the same things I do, but hundreds of years ago and in entirely different circumstances.
The path of pain
Perhaps the biggest problem with converting to the church of therapy is that its structure is complete and its effects often inescapable.Converting to the sect of self-healing provides:
An explanation for suffering (trauma, not sin)
A path to redemption (therapy, not prayer)
A community of believers (those “doing the work”)
A moral framework (therapeutic language replacing virtue ethics)
A permanent state of becoming (always healing, never healed)
That last part is crucial. Like religion, you’re never done. There is always more work to be done on yourself. You are a permanent patient. The difference is that religious devotion pointed outward — serve others, build character, endure suffering with grace. Therapeutic devotion points inward — protect yourself, set boundaries, prioritise your feelings.
The subtle acceptance of permanent patienthood means that we also baulk at anything that doesn’t validate the illness. We’ve created a culture where the worst thing you can do is suggest that someone’s suffering might have a simpler remedy than they think.
To say that someone needs to “toughen up” is toxic masculinity. To suggest that fresh air and exercise might help is dismissive. To point out that previous generations survived worse without therapy is invalidating.
Everything is trauma. Nothing is choice. No one is responsible. And the only acceptable response is more therapy.
What we lose in this transition is profound. Character-building through hardship. The dignity of suffering well. The ancient understanding that some pain is not pathology but pedagogy — life teaching you something you need to learn.
The Stoics knew that virtue can be built through adversity. Every major wisdom tradition understood that comfort does not produce character. Challenge does. Friction does. Even failure does.
We’ve replaced all of that with “You should talk to someone.” As though talking has ever, in the history of humanity, been a substitute for doing.
Seeds of freedom
There are plenty of people in dire need of serious support. People dealing with genuine trauma, clinical depression, debilitating anxiety. These people deserve compassion and proper care, and they have my deepest respect.
Of course, in such a state, the best antidote may indeed be found through speaking with a professional who can help.
But for the rest? What would actually help most people?
Sleep eight hours. Exercise daily. Eat real food. Spend time in nature. Build something with your hands. Have deep conversations with people you trust. Take on responsibility. Do hard things. Fail at them. Try again.
These require effort. They require agency. They require you to be something other than a patient.
There are things that heal that have always healed. Dancing and laughing and cooking and building and growing and serving. These things don’t require a diagnosis. They require participation in life.
Yet it eludes us.
We die a spiritual death when we treat wellbeing as a product of medical intervention.
The need to make meaning in our lives can’t be replaced by diagnoses and the hunger for belonging can’t be satiated by support groups.
The church of therapy offers absolution without transformation and meaning without metaphysics.
Many of you would do best resorting to more traditional remedies:
The heat of the sun and human contact. Sufficient rest and nourishment of the soul.
h/t Simon Stowski, whose comment made me run to my notebook
