No, we don’t all need therapy
Raking over old dramas often does more harm than good
Only the most heartless fantasist would deny the life-saving role that therapy plays in helping people manage mental illness. Some people, of course, find it enjoyable or helpful for their own reasons and fair play to them. ‘You do you, babe,’ as they say.
But in the round, there is more wrong than right with the edifice. What else is one to conclude after Meghan ‘Sussex’ née Markle, one of the luckiest and most spoiled women in the world, posted on Instagram last week that that the ‘hardest seven years’ of her life – those that followed her becoming a duchess, having two healthy children and trading a royal residence for a $29 million mansion in California – had come to an end? It’s previously been reported that Harry (himself no stranger to therapy-induced self-pity) spent ‘a fortune’ on therapy for his beloved wife so she could enjoy a healthy entrée into motherhood. What good did it do?
Whatever your answer, it seems we can’t get enough of it. The number of workers leaving their old jobs and retraining as psychoanalysts – the hip methodology once more – has soared. We are in, as the New York Times has put it, ‘a larger psychoanalytic moment’. I know at least three people my age training to become psychoanalysts: two in the Jungian method, one Freudian.
I am not the first to notice the skewing foul of therapy culture, of course. Just last month, the journalist Esme Hewitt wrote a piece for the Times headlined: ‘I tried therapy but it just made me feel self-involved.’ The American journalist Abigail Shrier’s best-selling 2024 book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up analysed the way ‘bad therapy encourages hyperfocus on one’s emotional states, which in turn makes symptoms worse’. Even as far back as 1963, in The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan accused Freudianism of oppressing women with its pernicious ideas about their inherent passivity. Even intelligent women – especially intelligent women – necked Freud’s Kool-Aid and, in so doing, built their own prisons.
Like many other educated, cosmopolitan women, I have had my fair share of therapy. I began it in my early 20s (it took some persuading) to help with my lifelong insomnia. But, in the hands of someone all too steeped in Freud, it quickly became about everything else… and nothing. Frustrated by the therapist’s irritating questions – these little probing darts intended to shock me into dislodging some buried and liberating truth – I eventually gave him up for another, much more foolish one. I was horrified at how much harder it was trying to explain myself and my discontents to these old (it seemed to me) men than to my friends. And to pay for the privilege with it. One big problem is intelligence: it often feels to people with a modicum of emotional and intellectual smarts that the therapist is ten steps behind. Arrogant as it sounds, more than once I have felt they ought to be paying me for my time.
It has taken me many, many more years though to hang up my therapy boots. Perhaps I’d just had the wrong guys, I reasoned. And the truth is, I have experienced brilliant, life-affirming therapy. Laid low at one point with obsessive thoughts I simply couldn’t control, I got some help on the NHS from a beautiful, sparky and assertive clinical psychologist who sorted me out. She was the first to plant the idea that the pyrotechnics of one’s neural nets do not truth equal. She went mad and joined a cult in Italy, and that was the end of that, but I was OK by then. Eventually, I slid back into another therapist’s embrace. She was kind and supportive but I didn’t benefit. What I did do was lose thousands upon thousands of pounds and many hours.
In the intervening years I have occasionally sought targeted therapy – CBT and its ilk – but generally I have begun to liberate myself from its expensive embrace. There was a moment in Italy when, sick at the thought of more parmigiana and arancini, I realised that I was done with the local cuisine. I had a similar moment recently when I realised I was throwing in the towel with therapists. I had a specific question to explore. The question was incapable of being answered, or even clarified, by the two therapists I sought out because, as I was reminded, all they can offer is ‘listening’.
Talking about your feelings is de rigueur now in the West. You can do it and expect reverence and respect. You can shut conversations and debates up just by referencing your emotions. Friends are naturally interested in their friends’ feelings – even men. Therapists should therefore be redundant for most people with something to get off their chest. Instead they are mushrooming – all while the NHS can’t scratch the surface of the most urgent psychiatric and clinical psychological needs among the poor and mentally ill.
I think often of the 2006 study published in the PMC journal showing that girls are more prone to depression than boys because they ruminate more with their friends. It is not rocket science to realise that raking over your negative feelings and rehashing events which then become psychodramas is tempting but unhealthy. Yet, many therapists feed on this temptation. It’s time to walk away. After all, we all have our own couches and those are free to use.
