Like everyone in this life, I've been in situations where I was all the way down and needed some real help to pull myself back up into a normal headspace. Many people have varying experiences with this kind of situation. Mine required professional help thanks to a sleep issue that had me in the grips of a spiral I couldn't pull out of.
I wanted to start with that paragraph above to make something very clear before I continue. I don't think getting therapy for your mental health is a bad thing when you really need it. I can attest to this personally. However, as I've also attested to personally, I think so much goes on around this culture that it genuinely marches straight into destructive territory.
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We've sunk into something like "therapy culture" as a society. It's a phrase that I see pop up from time to time, and the more it does, the more I notice what the alarm bells being sounded are warning us about.
Therapy culture is something that causes people to examine human nature and hyper-fixate on how experiences affect us negatively. There's a sort of fear and anxiety that gets birthed from that kind of mentality, because it causes you to see the negative parts of any experience until those negative feelings become the chief focus of anything that happens to you.
The point is to help you avoid or recontextualize negative experiences, but, honestly, it only causes people to focus on them even more.
It's also given birth to something that I absolutely despise in our modern culture, and that's seeing every interaction, whether happy or negative, through a lens of suspicion for some psychological malady. You've probably heard or seen it yourself, even if you didn't recognize it for what it is at the moment. You've heard someone talk about "generational trauma," or that someone is a "narcissist." You've probably seen or heard husbands, wives, children, co-workers, etc., being accused of something that sounds like it came straight out of a college psychology textbook.
This isn't just being done by random people. This is being done by psychologists to their patients.
Therapy culture is so unbelievably toxic nowadays
— Lauren Chen (@TheLaurenChen) July 23, 2026
Therapists like this should be held liable for wrecking their patients' lives pic.twitter.com/bRV2gZOvuM
Why we've got here is its own article. What I want to point out is something a bit more subversive.
The more I look at therapy culture, the more I believe it has a lot in common with critical theory.
For those who don't know or need a refresher, critical theory originated in the Frankfurt School, an establishment where neo-Marxism found its origins in America. Instead of economic and class struggles, the Frankfurt School's brand of critical theory concerned itself more with culture. It began in the 1930s, and its influence can now be seen in the modern left.
The point of critical theory is to highlight the flaws of a civilization and create division based on those flaws. As you've seen with the modern left, America is nothing but its sins. It's not a country worthy of forgiveness and must be fundamentally remade and restructured. The overwhelming good that America is gets ignored or is weighed against the sins it committed, while the one doing the weighing puts their finger on the scale to America's disadvantage.
It's dirty psychology meant to destroy.
Now, look at modern therapy culture. In many ways, it does the same thing. Human nature is reduced to its flaws, and those flaws are greatly exaggerated. Every negative emotion is destructive or crippling to the self or to those around them.
"You're a victim of your husband's narcissism."
"You're suffering from a psychological disorder that we can medicate."
"The trauma you experienced as a child causes you to act in unproductive ways, but it's not your fault."
See the pattern?
Nothing is the person's fault. The world is the issue. Things are always being done to them. The only way to fight it is through psychotropics, "healthy" expectations for interactions with others, and living by the idea that you're protecting yourself by asserting that your POV is correct, even if the world tells you it's not. You might recognize that last one as "living your truth."
As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, some psychologists are going so far as to suggest their patients cut off friends and family who resist the psychological conditioning the therapist is putting them through, effectively creating a sort of social isolation from fact-based opinions in the name of protecting the psyche. Instead of protecting the psyche, however, you tend to grow into learned helplessness. The therapy continues to "treat" symptoms of a disease that likely isn't there. You take the "professional" opinion on what to do, and before you know it, the therapist is your life coach, and you're medicated to kingdom come.
Basically, too many modern therapists have become Grima Wormtongue from "The Lord of the Rings."
Now, I wonder what kind of system would benefit from a swath of people who are consistently victims, are willing to heavily medicate their brains into submission, and are easily swayed with buzzwords and offended by facts.
