Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It's Left Us More Anxious and Divided

As featured in The Wall Street Journal, Fox & Friends, The Hill and The Daily Wire
*A Next Big Ideas Club pick*

A provocative look at how therapy culture has reshaped the way we live, speak, and relate to one another, and how it’s changing the fabric of American life, by acclaimed psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert.

In America today, seeing a therapist is no longer taboo, and mental-health resources are more accessible than ever. Yet despite this progress, anxiety and depression among Americans are now at record highs, and the country feels even more divided.

After twenty years as a practicing therapist and go-to media expert on mental health, Jonathan Alpert has come to an unsettling conclusion: his own profession is part of the problem. In Therapy Nation, Alpert:

• considers the possibility that we've become over-therapized, and examine how this practice, intended to heal, may be making us weaker instead of stronger;
• explores how concepts and buzzwords once confined to therapy sessions have infiltrated public discourse, where their meaning becomes distorted, sometimes intentionally;
• unpacks how feeling good has replaced getting better and accountability has been traded out for affirmation;
• the ways in which too much therapy, or the wrong kind, can have painful effects on individuals, families, communities and the nation.

Drawing from case studies and widening the lens to consider the social forces beyond the therapist's office, Alpert makes the urgent case for his profession to heal itself so it can get back to healing us.