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By whom? My impression is that therapists are broadly pretty middle class and their bosses aren’t exceptionally well off either.
One of Shrier’s points is that it’s much more appealing for therapists to treat an anxious but otherwise normal teen than someone with a worse condition, since they make the same money, the client is generally easier to get along with.
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My googling just now suggests that mental health services in America cost something like 200 to 300 billion dollars a year. You can decide if that sounds like a lot or not, I suppose.
Anyway, I imagine it's a combination of things. I'm going to be totally anecdotal here and make some guesses based on women in my life who seem heavily steeped in this culture, so take it with a massive grain of salt.
On the one hand, you have celebrities like Dr. Phil (net worth $460 million) who genuinely do seem to make a lot of money off of their national brands. Same thing, I suspect, with high profile therapy-oriented book authors who cycle through media targeting women. More than just the money they make, though, they soak up a huge amount of attention while cementing the public frame that everyone could and should use therapy, no different from going to a doctor, and that therapy works and can help anyone. Any time I find myself at a doctors office waiting room in the middle of the day with women's day time tv on, I'm constantly caught off guard by how utterly pervasive the therapy language is in the normal conversations of the (if I'm being mean) clucking hens on those shows. It's the water the fish are swimming in, to mix animal metaphors. This space seems to have a lot of really high profile shysters, to my eyes - it reminds me a lot of tele-evangelists for a slightly different subculture.
And on the other hand, there is the properly credentialed world of normal, local therapists out there who, I suspect, mostly believe in what they're doing but are also aware of how hard and fuzzy working with people is, aren't making huge bank, and are trying to do their best... not that different from, say, teachers. I actually had plenty of experience with such counseling in my teen years, as a matter of fact. And my impression is not that such people are bad people particularly - but like anyone, I think they kind of have to believe that what they do is generally helpful and a helpful part of a solution to other people's problems, even though often times people don't seem to get any better (but then, people really are enormously complicated, and change is hard, and people need to want to change, and you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink, and very often it is the social context of someone that is holding them back, and...) In all of this, they are just like the people I know in high frequency trading who kind of have to believe that by increasing liquidity in the system, they really making finance more efficient for everyone, and just like the higher up I know at Raytheon who kind of has to believe that national defense is obviously important and a net good and Raytheon is itself a net good in that space, and just like the literal DEI trainer I know (mom of my son's friend) who is a nice person who kind of has to believe that she's making the world a better place by running DEI workshops at our local bank. And all of them have mortgages that kind of depend on them believing that what they do is worth doing, even though it can be hard to tell when the world is so complicated, so they can keep their own lives afloat. But all of that eventually adds up to real money, in aggregate.
And yet, as I say, the women I know who seem most drawn to therapy culture and counseling seem... not great. Maybe they would be even worse if that was not a part of their life; there's literally no way I could know that. But I really, really do wonder.
This has the same vibe as “all the people I know who seem most drawn to oncologists all seem like they’re sick.” Um… yeah?
I don’t think therapy works for everyone. It works for some, and not very well for others. I’m rooting for myself being in the first group. But I hear testimonials from people who it has definitely helped, and I don’t see any reason to doubt them.
There might well be people of your acquaintance who went through therapy, found it helpful, and then moved on. They don’t talk about it, because it’s not an identity for such people, and mental health is very personal. The people for whom it is and identity and doesn’t work well are definitely the ones who are going to talk about it more. I’m not sure you can make a good argument about its effectiveness from the people who talk the most loudly about it. I think you need studies for that.
But I agree, therapy culture is toxic. It’s the equivalent of WebMD making everyone think they have cancer. It takes something private and useful and turns it into a very public weapon. Most people don’t need the tools of therapy, and I think the idea that they do is silly. It’s a condescension to the needs of a select group of suffering people. It’s like chemotherapy — it saves lives, but you shouldn’t give it to someone without the need for it.
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Any number of behavior healthcare organizations which aren't paying anyone very much but are employing a lot of people to handle all the paperwork.
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