The Unofficial Rules of Telling Someone They Should ‘Go to Therapy’
Nowadays, it seems that we are all either going to therapy, self-prescribing replacements for therapy, or telling people to go to therapy. It’s become the uncontested mantlepiece of First World well-being strategies.
The history of psychotherapy draws the origins of modern therapy from religious, magical, and medical approaches to the mind. Though development in the 20th and 21st centuries have seen the emergence of numerous different types of therapy, our general understanding of therapy consists of going to a person, engaging in what Sigmund Freud coined as the “talking cure,” and probably linking our problems to whatever happened in our childhood. In some sense, mental illness and mental health care are quintessentially North American in concept; both poison and cure reside in the self, the self’s origin story, and the self’s individual actions.
And the cost? Usually around $100–300 an hour for those in Canada and the United States. It’s ironic that for those without coverage, therapy is an unattainable luxury good. But then again, so are most dental treatments and pharmaceuticals.
The prominence of therapy as an essential health care practice is likely tied to North America’s growing self-perception of the mental health crisis. And it will only grow: within the circumstances…
