How America Became Addicted to Therapy
A few months ago, as I was absent-mindedly mending a pillow, I thought, I should quit therapy. Then I quickly suppressed the heresy. Among many people I know, therapy is like regular exercise or taking vitamin D: something a sensible person does routinely to clear out the system. BetterHelp ran an ad where a woman says she’s ignoring a guy’s texts because he doesn’t see a therapist. “Hard pass,” she explains. “Red flag.” Therapy for many people has no natural endpoint. It’s just “baked into my life,” as one patient told the psychiatrist Richard Friedman, explaining why he’d been seeing a therapist for the past 15 years.
Therapy is so destigmatized now that a lot of us sound like therapists. We’re “codependent,” “triggered,” “catastrophizing.” We cut off our friends who are toxic. Justin Bieber doesn’t fear an exposé on the damage of childhood fame; he freely discusses his trauma and healing. Oprah wonders what happened to you. And once you figure it out, you’ll find hours of free advice on TherapyTok.
Friedman, who has been teaching and seeing patients for more than 35 years, is pleased about the new openness. But he’s also worried for us. Treating therapy as routine has led to the “medicalization of everyday life,” he says. On this week’s Radio Atlantic, Friedman proposes a radical idea: A lot of people could probably quit therapy.
Listen to the conversation here:
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The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: Now, you know that this interview is a kind of wish fulfillment for anyone who’s ever been in therapy because I get to ask you questions and find out all about what you’re up to.
Richard Friedman: Yes, indeed.
Rosin: [Laughs.] Do you recognize that? I just want to make that clear.
Friedman: I do.
Rosin: Okay, great.
Friedman: Yeah.
[Music]
Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin, and that is Dr. Richard Friedman.
And what do you do?
Friedman: I’m a psychiatrist.
[Music]
Rosin: Friedman runs the psychopharmacology clinic at Cornell. He’s been a psychiatrist for more than 35 years. But in a recent story for The Atlantic, he made a shocking and terrifying proposition: that lots of people could quit therapy, right now. As it happens, I’d had that thought myself recently: I could quit therapy.
Friedman: Uh-huh. And how long had you been afflicted by that thought?
Rosin: [Laughs.]
Friedman: I’m just kidding.
[Music]
It came to me a little while, and I will tell you at the end what I decided to do and
