The Rise of the Therapy Jerks

Therapy should help people get better, but some people use it to justify being worse.

This week, actress Anna Kendrick went viral for saying that she wouldn’t get involved with any man who hadn’t been to therapy. Twitter promptly rushed to dunk on her, pointing out that men who go to therapy are, well…this:

Anna Kendrick’s story is a bit more complicated than her randomly deciding to rule out men who haven’t seen a therapist, which I know sounds enticingly cringe to the cohort of people whose worst nightmare is an “affluent white female liberal” or AWFL (I just found out about this today, I’m obsessed.) Apparently, for the past seven years she was in a relationship (privately, with an anonymous ex-boyfriend) who was emotionally abusive. But—and this feels almost too on the nose—she also said that her couple’s therapist sided with her abusive ex through most of their sessions, up until the end of their relationship.

Anna Kendrick is also not alone in this belief. I’ve seen countless tweets and posts saying that only when someone has “fully healed” and been in therapy for some period of time (not clear how long) are they worthy of love. As someone with OCD, which I’ll always have: lol.

I get where the fiercely pro-therapy contingent is coming from. When I was growing up in the ‘90s, therapy was kind of taboo. It was assumed that the only people who saw a therapist had serious mental illness. I was around seven when my parents took me to a therapist (the impetus was some uncharacteristically bad behavior on my part—I TP’ed the bathroom at a restaurant, which they saw was a cry for help) and I remember telling everyone at school that I had to go to the “eye doctor” instead. Arguably this made me seem even weirder—what could possibly be so wrong with my eyes that I needed to see a doctor for them every week? But a psychologist seemed much more embarrassing. When my mom told me it was nothing to be ashamed of, I said, “The word psycho is literally in the name.”

Like many relics of the ‘90s—prioritization of carbs over fats, glorification of small butts, Trump being a funny and unthreatening media personality—we have overcorrected. Therapy went from being a shameful secret to a requirement for full humanhood, at least for a sizable chunk of people. This trend began with some normal and probably necessary shifts in perception. We started telling teenagers, a notoriously self-conscious and mentally ill cohort, that it was okay to talk about mental health. Celebrities began opening up about their anxiety and depression. OB-GYNs started talking to moms about the warning signs of postpartum depression. You could argue that this version of “mental health awareness” was overly sanitized and only accepting of “cute” mental illnesses (I’ve seen how people react to some of the more taboo OCD intrusive thoughts, or personality disorders, and it’s not very accepting!) But in general, this shift was needed. People thinking too positively about therapy isn’t as big of a problem as other people—especially young men—being afraid to seek help.

But there were, of course, downsides. One thing I noticed was the potential for dangerous social contagion as we “raised awareness” about various mental health struggles. When I watched Degrassi in the mid-2000s, there was a very dramatic plotline where a scene-girl character grapples with self-harm. She was hardly the only representation of this stereotype, but somewhere along the line, being “emo” or “scene” became synonymous with cutting yourself. All of the “raising awareness” seemed to create awareness in kids who otherwise wouldn’t have considered doing this. At my school, there was a trend among the more “alt” girls to lightly imply self harm by hiding their arms in particularly conspicuous ways. Most if not all of these girls were not actually cutting. I have to ask: was it actually beneficial that Degrassi and similar teen media had this plotline? What was the ratio of “kids who got help for cutting” versus “kids who started cutting because they saw it, or were friends with someone who saw it?” I don’t know! But it’s worth examining.

The other downside, of course, is the fact that as therapy became more acceptable for people as part of “self care” instead of treatment for a specific diagnosed mental illness, it attracted people who previously would have just yapped the ears off their hair stylist or bartender. And the “therapy man” who accuses you of gaslighting for asking him not to text his ex-girlfriend is a prime example.