Protest is the purest form of love
This review by Julia Macintosh appears in the 40th Anniversary issue of Asylum Magazine.
The online event to launch this issue and celebrate 40 years of Asylum Magazine will be
Monday 23rd March 6pm-7pm (GMT) Register here
“Fourty years ago, when Asylum launched its first issue, would we have imagined a world in which personal therapy was delivered through a digitized, platformised, economized, profit-focused industry? With a therapist’s responses copied and pasted into a chatbox, from one client to another? With six-session packages targeting cognitive behaviour? With AI and algorithms to data-mine emotional crisis and existential despair? It’s a brave new world.
Elizabeth Cotton is my friend and I know with what passion, commitment and courage this book was written. She brings together her experience as a trade unionist and as a psychotherapist, to analyse the labour model of the therapeutic profession. This is not a book for the faint-hearted; it spotlights the transition of therapy from a model of care to a model of business – a process she terms ‘uberisation.’
UberTherapy delivers an intense text peppered with wry humour to present academically sound research and startling statistics, incisive analysis of the austerity project’s impact upon the UK healthcare system, and a compelling plea to recognize where the future of therapy is heading. It also reminds us, in the midst of all this discouraging information, to maintain our humanity and our humility – by employing a creative device in the persona of Hair-n-Teeth, who symbolizes the vulnerability essential to any real therapeutic endeavour.
Essentially, the book issues a rallying cry that “Therapy is, at its best, is an emancipatory project, so use it to raise your consciousness, fight the internal and external oppressors and confront reality as it is.” Now that is wisdom for the 21st century.”
Julia Macintosh is a member of the Asylum magazine collective, co-editor of Unpsychology Magazine and Director of the Centre for Mad Culture UK.
You can buy a copy of UberTherapy: The new business of mental health by BUP here
@survivingwork.bsky.social @survivingwk
@UberTherapy.bsky.social @ubertherapies