UberTherapy & Enshittification Part 1
“In UberTherapy I use the phrase therapeutic Tinder. It’s a provocation about what it means to be in this sector of e-commerce: being able to swipe, being able to choose from a smorgasbord of therapists. If you don’t like them, move on. In the early days of online therapy platforms, that was literally part of their advertising: “No need to become dependent on a therapist. If you don’t like them, we’ll find you another one.” I looked back at the adverts from five years ago and you don’t see them anymore. Now it’s all green pages and healthy sustainability imagery. But in the early days they’d literally say: this is cheap, this is fast, you don’t have to be dependent.
I also talk about therapy as a model of retail therapy. What does it mean to buy, to swipe, to rank and rate? And the shaming and blaming involved in that, both of the client who isn’t able to get what they want, and then keeps spending money to make themselves feel better. It becomes this argument, which I think is very visible in the states of bad therapy, about being a bad patient and being a bad therapist. Again, it individualizes a problem about a business model.
There is an enshittification, there is a degradation, of the work of the therapist and also what the consumer has a right to consume, has a right to demand. In the book I call it “Sabor a Mierda.” We’ve got this sense in us that something’s a bit off about this. I invite people to use this gut feeling that this isn’t quite right, as a way of determining what is harmful and what is not. These legal cases will live out. The United States leads the way, but the United Kingdom is following right behind you. We have to pre-empt this: develop a critical sense of what’s shit and what isn’t, and what’s right for us and what isn’t, and use that to be more discerning about where we place ourselves in this landscape.
My research into UberTherapy made me really angry, because for me the north star of therapy is: I can show myself as I really am to another person. That’s so powerful, isn’t it? It’s so rare. And that took me a lifetime to feel safe enough to show myself. And I found myself really hurtling backwards. It felt just incredibly sad for me that if that was your first experience of therapy, what would that feel like? What would that tell you about yourself?
It was such a huge fight for me to get a basic level of self-acceptance. It makes me angry that somebody would be thrown off course by something that really didn’t work. I call it in the book an algorithmic invitation to self-harm.”
To read and listen to Part 1 of the podcast UberTherapy & the Enshittification of our Relational Lives with Justin Karter for Mad in America click here.
You can buy a copy of UberTherapy: The new business of mental health by BUP here
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