Bad Therapy: Why Americans Are Obsessed With Therapy And How It's Harming Them

When Laurel Jackson started experiencing bouts of anxiety that were deeper and darker than any she’d known before, the pastor who was counseling her recommended she see a therapist. As a Christian, Jackson wanted a therapist who shared her faith. At first, she thought she’d found a good match with a therapist connected to her primary care physician’s office. After a year of sessions starting in 2021, Jackson now views her experience with her therapist as a mixed bag. Although she learned new coping tools and had someone to talk to without feeling judged, she also felt pushed into trying medications with side effects she’s still dealing with. 

“There are so many more things that I ended up learning that, had I known them in the beginning, it would have saved me a lot of frustration,” Jackson tells Evie Magazine. 

Although her therapist couldn’t prescribe medication for her transitional anxiety, Jackson says her therapist and doctor pushed her to go the pharmaceutical route. Jackson tried five different medications and felt blindsided by side effects.

“I don’t even remember my wedding because I was so heavily medicated,” Jackson says. “I still have memory problems because of getting on and off medicine. I don’t say that with a bitter spirit because I know that they were trying to help me, but I think that the disclaimer on both the doctor's and the therapist’s end should have been much more in-your-face than what it was.”

Jackson wishes she had known she could shop around for therapists to make sure she picked someone who was right for her.

“I didn’t realize that I had the freedom to find someone else,” she says. “My personality is very much like, ‘Oh, if I take this time to create this relationship which is one of trust, I’m going to feel bad walking away from someone because they’re not the person for me.’”

More Americans are seeking out therapy than ever before – the number of adults ages 18 to 44 who received mental health treatment jumped four percentage points from 2019 to 2021, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Companies like BetterHelp and Talkspace aggressively market to millennials and Gen Z. These companies push the message that everyone should be in therapy, promising customers online sessions at low prices. But many of these customers don’t understand what therapy is.

The people with serious training can’t afford to participate in a business model that pays them like an Uber driver. Meaningful therapy takes time and time is money.

“People have this idea that when they decide to ‘go to therapy,’ they have some idea what they’ll be getting. Sadly, it’s not so. There’s no standard, universal thing called ‘therapy.’ If you go to a medical doctor and you have a bacterial infection, you’re going to get prescribed an antibiotic. But if you go to a ‘therapist,’ there’s no telling what you’re going to get,” Dr. Jonathan Shedler, an internationally regarded psychologist and author, tells Evie Magazine.  

The quality of training and supervision a “licensed therapist” receives can vary widely, especially since licensure is different in every state. It’s important to find a practitioner who’s been on the receiving end of hundreds of hours of psychotherapy themselves, Shedler says.

“You really need to be an informed consumer,” he says. “If it sounds too good to be true, like everything else, it probably is. If a company promises to match you up with a therapist for a low subscription fee, you have to ask yourself who do you think they’re recruiting as therapists? Because the people with serious training can’t afford to participate in a business model that pays them like an Uber driver. They literally can’t afford it. … Meaningful therapy takes time – time with somebody who is a well-trained professional – and time is money.”

It’s not uncommon for Shedler to see patients who thought they were beyond the point of help. 

“As a psychotherapy teacher and a practitioner, the thing that breaks my heart is that people get this fake therapy, pseudotherapy, superficial therapy, unskilled therapy – call it whatever you want – people get that and it doesn’t help them,” Shedler says. “They come away feeling worse about themselves: I’m so broken even therapy couldn’t help me. Or else they come away thinking therapy doesn’t work.”

A bad therapist can enable a client to remain stuck in unhealthy patterns. Even more seriously, a therapist can focus on a client’s gender dysphoria and ignore other mental health conditions, steering the client toward surgery he or she may later regret – an issue that licensed marriage and family therapist Stephanie Winn highlights as associate producer of No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care.

Winn, who hosts the podcast You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist, rebutted the idea that everyone should be in therapy in an interview with Evie Magazine.

Therapy is for people who are having problems that are beyond their own ability to solve through their current means.

“Some people have even said that they think everyone should be in therapy all the time, and I disagree with that because you only have so many hours in a week,” Winn says. “Therapy is for people who are having problems that are beyond their own ability to solve through their current means. … Therapy is also for life changes and relational problems, again, when they go beyond your ability to solve them with your current understanding and coping tools, or when your old coping tools are breaking down.”

What are some therapist red flags, so to speak? 

“Therapy should be a space where you can laugh, you can cry, and you can get mad, and you can start from where you’re at, including your hesitancy about therapy,” Winn says. “You should be able to vocalize that. … It should not feel like that therapist is trying to convince you to trust them. That is a red flag.”

“A therapist should be able to hear those doubts and help you understand yourself in a compassionate way as to exactly why you have those doubts,” she continues.

A therapist who never challenges clients isn’t helping them, Winn says. 

“I think a lot of therapists err too much on the side of safety,” she says. “One of the most powerful things you can do as a therapist, if you’re doing it well, is create space for repressed or compartmentalized emotions to come to the surface, and that has got to include towards the therapist themselves. This is why I’m a big advocate of relational therapy.”

Meanwhile, pop culture is flooded with therapy-related buzzwords – concepts like boundaries, trauma, and self-care distorted through the lens of social media and TV scripts. Winn recalls watching a reality show in which a woman said her therapist told her to hug a doll and eat popsicles to heal her inner child – a big red flag.

“Let’s think about what a child needs to heal. For a child to be nurtured, it needs an adult,” Winn says. “The definition of childhood is vulnerability, right? If you’re just giving up to the demands of your child, is that signaling that there’s a competent adult on the scene? No, it’s not. It’s signaling to your inner child that you’ve basically been abandoned to your own whims and you have a weak parent that’s giving in to your demands. So, you want to heal your inner child? You need to bring your inner adult.”

“That’s why a therapist can be beneficial. A therapist can serve as a proxy by which you can internalize what it is to have a proper adult around. If your inner child needs some comfort because of some distressing emotion, I hope you have something better than a popsicle to offer. I hope that’s not your only tool.”

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