Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It's Left Us More Anxious and Divided

For fans of Lori Gottlieb and Julie Smith, a thought-provoking interrogation into “therapy culture” and how it's dramatically changed the way we live, speak, and interact.

In our day and age, therapy is the norm: seeing a therapist has become largely destigmatized; resources are far more available and accessible through in-person and online services; and sessions are commonly understood as a form of self-care that can genuinely better our lives. But what about the dangers of too much of the wrong kind therapy? Are we in a period of overcorrection, at risk of trapping patients in endless validation feedback loops? And why is it that even though therapy has never been more ubiquitous, our mental health crisis has never been worse?

Jonathan Alpert, dubbed by the New York Observer as “the media’s go-to guy for psychoanalyzing the City,” argues something both counterintuitive and unsettling: his own profession is part of the problem. Daily conversations have been inundated by “therapy-speak”– terms that have escaped from the therapist’s office into the wider discourse without any of their clinical, scientific context, and are further warped by social media. Many of Alpert’s colleagues have lost the point of their profession, becoming crutches instead of counselors.

With compassion and empathy, Alpert has written the book that takes his profession to the task, raising urgent questions about today's "therapy nation" -- and the stakes of our national mental health crisis have never been higher.