Stories of UberTherapy
You are invited to attend Stories of UberTherapy on the 26 June 6.30-8pm BST to launch a podcast series with therapists, social justice activists, trade unionists and progressive tech campaigners about the uberization of care.
In a discussion between Andrew Samuels, Linda Michaels and Elizabeth Cotton, Stories of UberTherapy will open up the debates about the ‘uberization’ of therapeutic practice, the business models behind it and the emerging political fault lines for therapists and the new consumers of digital therapy.
Stories of UberTherapy is a series of six recorded conversations based around the six chapters of UberTherapy: The new business of mental health.
Chapter 1: Angerland with Todd Essig (psychoanalyst) & Amy Levy (psychoanalyst), co-chairs of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Committee on AI on how to use our psychoanalytic minds to understand the future of therapy.
Chapter 2: UberTherapy with Alex Hanna (DAIR) & Emily Bender (University of Washington), authors of The AI Con, to explore the hype around AI.
Chapter 3: Psychic Pilates with China Mills (Dealths by Welfare), Emily Yue (Healing Justice London) & Sarah Waters (University of Leeds), researchers and activists working together on work related suicide help us to understand the weaponisation of work, welfare and mental health under austerity.
Chapter 4: Do you have to marry a rich man to be a therapist? with James Farrar (Worker Info Exchange) & Hilda Poulson (National Union of Healthcare Workers), to learn the lessons of organizing Uber drivers and the Kaiser Permanente hunger strike.
Chapter 5: Therapeutic Tinder with Jumanah Younis (Psychotherapist) & Julia MacIntosh (Centre for Mad Culture UK), writers and activists on how to talk about money, love and care in a way that doesn’t cause self-harm.
Chapter 6: RealTherapy™ with Jon Allen (Psychoanalyist) & Elizabeth Lunbeck (Harvard University), practitioners, teachers & writers thinking about how we keep doing the deep work.
Join the debate online 26 June 18.30 about about whether a MuchBetterHelp is possible here.
Biographies of our discussants
Andrew Samuels Andrew Samuels is a relational Jungian psychoanalyst, professor, activist and political consultant (including to the National Health Service). He founded or co-founded many organisations within the 'psy' field, including Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility, Psychotherapy and Counselling Union, Analysis and Activism, International Association for Jungian Studies, and the Confederation for Analytical Psychology. Elected Chair of the UK Council for Psychotherapy 2009-2012, and has worked as Consultant for Routledge's Jung List since 1984. His many books have been translated into up to 21 languages. These include Jung and the Post-Jungians (1985), The Plural Psyche (1989), The Political Psyche 1993), Politics on the Couch (2001), Persons, Passions, Psychotherapy, Politics (2015), and A New Therapy for Politics? (2018). His most recent book (2025) is published: Reflecting Critically on the Political Psyche: Therapy, Testament and Trouble in Psychoanalysis and Jungian Analysis. A selection of video lectures and 'rants' is available on www.andrewsamuels.com
Linda Michaels, PsyD, MBA is a psychologist with a private practice in Chicago. She is Chair and Co-Founder of the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN), a grassroots nonprofit organization that advocates for improved access and awareness of psychotherapy in the US. She is the author and editor of the book Advancing Psychotherapy for the Next Generation, an important book to read about what lies ahead for the UK therapy sector. In 2025 PsiAN produced an important report looking at the business model behind Practice Management Companies providing platforms for therapists to use in their work The Business of Psychotherapy: Practice Management Companies.
Elizabeth Cotton is a writer and educator in the field of industrial relations and mental health and is Associate Professor for Responsible Business at the University of Leicester. She has trained and worked as a psychotherapist in the UK’s NHS and has had lots of therapy. She comes from a trade union background, working as head of education for a global union federation in the extractive industries and founded Surviving Work which explores whether it’s possible to do that including her book Surviving Work in Healthcare: Helpful stuff for people on the frontline. Her book UberTherapy: The new business of mental health is published by Bristol University Press in 2025.
Biographies of our storytellers
Jon G. Allen, Ph.D., retired after 40 years of practice as a member of the psychology staff at The Menninger Clinic, where he held the position of Clinical Professor in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Baylor College of Medicine. His diverse practice at Menninger included teaching and supervising fellows and residents; conducting psychotherapy, diagnostic consultations, and psychoeducational programs; and leading research on clinical outcomes. In retirement, he has continued to teach, write, and consult with early-career therapists. He is a member of the honorary faculty at the Houston Center for Psychoanalytic Studies and the adjunct faculty of the Institute for Spirituality and Health at the Texas Medical Center. His latest books are Bringing Psychotherapy to Life through Caring Connections and Trusting in Psychotherapy. His earlier books include Restoring Mentalizing in Attachment Relationships: Treating Trauma with Plain Old Therapy, Mentalizing in Clinical Practice (with Peter Fonagy and Anthony Bateman), Coping with Trauma: From Self-Understanding to Hope, and Coping with Depression: From Catch-22 to Hope, all published by American Psychiatric Association Publishing. Additional books are Mentalizing in the Development and Treatment of Attachment Trauma (Karnac) and Traumatic Relationships and Serious Mental Disorders (Wiley).
Dr. Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington where she is also the Faculty Director of the Computational Linguistics Master of Science program and affiliate faculty in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Information School. In 2023, she was included in the inaugural Time 100 list of the most influential people in AI. She is frequently consulted by policymakers, from municipal officials to the federal government to the United Nations, for insight into how to understand so-called AI technologies.
Todd Essig, Ph.D. is Faculty and Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the William Alanson White Institute, Faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis, inaugural member of Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN) Advisory Board, and Distinguished Fellow of the NYS Psychological Association (NYSPA). Widely known as a pioneer in the innovative uses of mental health technologies, he publishes and lectures widely. He’s founder and chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s (APsA) Commission on Artificial Intelligence (CAI) and a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) sub-committee on artificial intelligence. Previously, he was a member of the IPA’s task force on telesessions and psychoanalytic education where he co-authored the “TF2 Report” used as the basis for IPA educational policy. During the pandemic he co-chaired APsA’s Covid-19 Advisory Team where he was awarded Distinguished Service awards from APsA and NYSPA. For 10 years, until the pandemic hit, he wrote "Managing Mental Wealth" for Forbes. Dr. Essig maintains a private practice in New York where he treats individuals and couples.
James Farrar is the Founder & Director of Worker Info Exchange (WIE). After leaving a career in tech James became an activist for worker rights in the gig economy. He was a claimant in the landmark worker rights case against Uber recently decided in favour of workers by the UK Supreme Court. James founded Worker Info Exchange having realized that surveillance and hidden unfair algorithmic management would be the next stage in the battle for worker rights in the gig economy. WIE has gone on to successfully litigate against Uber and Ola Cabs to secure worker access to personal data and protection from unfair automated decision making.
Dr. Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) and a Lecturer in the School of Information at the University of California Berkeley. She is an outspoken critic of the tech industry, a proponent of community-based uses of technology, and a highly sought-after speaker and expert who has been featured across the media, including articles in the Washington Post, Financial Times, The Atlantic, and Time.
Dr. Amy Levy is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. She chairs the American Psychoanalytic Association’s (APsA) Commission on Artificial Intelligence (CAI), serves on the subcommittee “Artificial Intelligence” for the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) committee, “Psychoanalysis and Technology,” serves on the editorial board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and she is Editor of the Substack series, "AI in My Mind," for The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. She is the author of the book, The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive. Dr. Levy lectures internationally on the intersection of psychoanalysis and artificial intelligence and maintains a private practice in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Elizabeth Lunbeck is a historian of the human sciences at Harvard University, specializing in the history of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychology. She teaches courses in the history of psychotherapy and of psychoanalysis. She has published several books: The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America; with , Bennett Simon, Family Romance, Family Secrets: Case Notes from an American Psychoanalysis, 1912, And The Americanization of Narcissism, which offers a wide-ranging history of the concept, asking why the question of narcissism has become so urgent in our culture; she has also edited an additional four volumes. She is currently writing a book, The Therapist: A Short History from Freud to ChatGPT. Lunbeck is an academic program graduate of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and holds an MA in Counseling Psychology.
Julia Macintosh is the founding director of the Centre for Mad Culture UK, as well as a trustee of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis, UK branch. She also serves in the editorial collectives of both Unpsychology Magazine and Asylum: the radical mental health magazine. She can be found at juliamacintosh.online. Her review of Ubertherapy appeared in Asylum’s winter 2026 issue.
China Mills is Head of Research at Healing Justice London and leads the Deaths by Welfare Project, documenting welfare state violence by centring the resistance of people with lived experience of the welfare system, and the strategies of bereaved families, in fighting for justice. For many years, China worked as an academic researching and teaching global mental health, with a focus on state and corporate production of harm, distress and deaths by suicide.
Hilda Poulson is a Director at National Union of Healthcare Workers, which represents nearly 20,000 healthcare workers, including social workers, therapists and psychologists, across California, Hawaii and Pennsylvania. NUHW carried out sustained strike action against Kaiser Permanente in 2024/5 including a high-profile hunger strike by behavioural health workers in Southern California. Hilda has led numerous organizing campaigns across California, including organizing behavioral health clinicians. She specializes in building worker-led campaigns, developing training programs, and supporting organizing across complex healthcare systems.
Sarah Waters is professor of French Studies, former Deputy Head of School (2015–2017) and Head of French (2011–2014) at the University of Leeds. Sarah’s recent research, funded by the Wellcome Trust and subsequently an AHRC research leaders fellowship has focused on work-related suicide and labour theory in France. This research was published as a monograph Suicide Voices. Labour Trauma in France by Liverpool University Press in 2020. She was awarded funding by Research England in 2021 to undertake a qualitative study of work-related suicide in the UK and is currently carrying out a comparative study in France, Canada and the UK funded by the Wellcome.
Jumanah Younis is a freelance writer and therapist currently working in private practice. They are interested in anti-oppressive approaches to psychotherapy and how we understand the body in relationship. Jumanah was a frontline worker in gender-based violence charities for over five years and has a background in feminist organising against cuts to services. They have written for the LRB blog, the Guardian and Red Pepper magazine on feminism and popular movements against neoliberalism. Their review of UberTherapy: The New Business of Mental Health is forthcoming in Radical Philosophy (Spring 2026).
Emily Yue Emily Yue is Work-Related Suicide and Social Justice Researcher at Healing Justice Ldn. Emily researches suicide from social justice perspectives. She is interested in how we understand ‘evidence’ about suicide, in particular around race. Her PhD research explored the ways UK suicide reporting and prevention focuses on white men and distracts from state violence, gatekeeping how we see cause and effect, and agency, in our knowledge about suicide. She previously worked at the University of Edinburgh, where she explored how male suicide prevention reproduces ableism through focusing on productivity and paid work. Emily is guided by disability justice and abolition, paying attention to and creating space for rest in responses to suicide and approaches to suicide recovery.
*TherapyBot graphics designed by Austin Ratner, The American Psychoanalyst tapmagazine.org
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