Insta-Therapy: Helping Or Hurting?

An introduction to the concerns with ‘Instagram therapy’.

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

- Eric Hoffer

For the uninitiated, ‘insta-therapy’ refers to the booming niche of therapists on Instagram- but not just therapists.

This niche is bursting at the seams with anyone or anything remotely related to the nebulous concept of ‘healing’. Coaches offering unregulated psychological or psychotherapeutic care and calling it “trauma healing”, lay people who call themselves “trauma educators”, spiritual healers, energy workers, ‘guides’, highly sensitive ‘empaths’, yoga teachers, new age ‘gurus’, activists, tarot card readers- and virtually any other configuration of wellness culture, new age or north American social justice you can conceive of.

As a result, what once was perhaps once a smallish group of therapists discussing therapy has metastasized into this amorphous blob of pop psychology, new age spirituality, American progressivism, utterly ludicrous jargon, and ‘healing’ culture. Notably, not therapy.

Before I begin my polemic, I want to draw attention to its positives. There are none, let’s carry on (joke). There are some therapists who share thought-provoking and insightful content. Mental health advocates who speak about their experiences and work against mental health stigma. Coaches who offer specialised and instructional help on areas such as motivation, empowerment, or how to run a business with integrity.

Social media is a double edged sword, in one sense it’s a powerful tool you can use to learn, connect with like-minded people, and grow professional and personal networks.

And it has also become a safe haven and breeding ground for those whose motivations are to become famous, get rich quickly, ‘build empires’, and use consumers as the instrument to achieve this. This gets tricky when the creators and consumers in question are dealing with mental health. A quote which has been attributed to Tim O’Reilly perfectly states this principle, “when something is free, you are the product.”

Some of the practices to achieve this fame and fortune are really… not great. Marketing to people’s pain points, selling them problems they don’t have, and then selling them solutions to those problems. Repeatedly sharing information that is popular- not true- because it brings in likes, followers and supply. Using credentials to legitimize really bad ideas or fringe beliefs and presenting them as psychology or psychotherapy.

Insta-therapy warrants scrutiny and criticism due to the aforementioned reasons, and because it has significant cultural influence and is leading the mainstream conversation on mental health.

In this article I’m going to introduce you to some of the overarching issues and concerns with insta-therapy, and I’ll expand upon specific areas in future articles.

Please bear in mind this is an article looking at the concerns not the positives.

Important caveat: I do not exclude myself from any of this criticism. I have fallen into probably every single one of these traps, and I do not consider myself morally superior to anyone and it’s necessary and crucial to take these concerns seriously.

Insta-therapy is not therapy.

Insta-therapy is to therapy what spaghetti is to spaceships, entirely unrelated.

Actual therapy is a private, confidential, human to human relationship, insta-therapy is content posted to social media pages and marketed as ‘therapeutic’.

Actual therapy is different for each client, because each client is different; insta-therapy is so over-generalised it could apply to anyone. This is intentional, it’s a marketing tactic designed to cast the widest net possible to create a large base of paying customers.

An insta-therapy post is not dissimilar to reading a horoscope. Purposely vague and general so that the reader feels that it is about them, identifies with it, and then pays with their attention and parts with their hard earned money.

Actual psychotherapists are bound by ethics which mandate us to always and only act in the best interests of the client. Despite the pretence, insta-therapy is neither therapy nor a therapeutic relationship, so this doesn’t apply. Insta-therapy is always about the interests of the therapist. Whether those interests are self-expression and sharing ideas- or those interests are to become famous, rich, and create a large base of paying customers.

Insta-therapy is the opposite of therapeutic in the sense that it is entirely about the interest of the therapist, and has nothing to do with the ‘client’.

This does not even take into account the unregulated non-professionals who have dangerously and confidently waded into psychological and psychotherapeutic care.

What makes this so insidious is that it’s dressed up to look as much like therapy- or what people think therapy is- as possible. Soothing, validating, telling people what they want to hear in dulcet tones and pastel colours. It’s reminiscent of the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel, dressed in brightly coloured candy, designed to be exactly what would entice hungry children lost in the woods.

The parallels with this fable don’t end there, insta-therapists go out of their way to make consumers buy into the idea that they are children. Rhetoric such as “you are a wounded child in an adult body” , pop psychology concepts like ‘inner child work’ and a fixation on childhood. This is so pervasive the term ‘trauma’ is now used as a synonym for childhood difficulties.

It is pseudo therapeutic. It gives the appearance of something vaguely related to therapy without offering any of the benefits. Psychotherapy is conducted within a mutually consensual private relationship that cannot scale.

In the words of master clinician Jonathan Shedler, “Anything prepackaged and promoted as a solution for anyone/everyone is a product. Meaningful psychotherapy is a unique relationship with a unique individual who must be understood on their own terms. It cannot scale.”

Using therapy jargon, ideas, or ‘therapy speak’ does not make it therapy- in fact those are fairly reliable markers that it is not therapy.

Let’s start with the bad ideas.

Insta-therapy is awash with bad ideas presented as therapy, often by therapists and psychologists themselves.

There’s a strong emphasis on promoting coddling and safetyism, new age gobbledegook, language (inexplicably) borrowed from quantum physics to legitimise ideas about ‘vibrations’ and ‘quantum healing’.

The most popular psychologist in insta-therapy tells people they are addicted to their emotions and symptoms of dysthymia are signs their souls are awakening.

The 24/7 meme cycle tells you what to ‘normalise’, offers advice column style instruction and admonition legitimized by ‘I’m a licensed therapist and I want you to know’. Chides you for daring to think problematic thoughts, infantilises adults, encourages complete abdication of adult responsibility, scolds about ‘fatphobia’ and ‘diet culture’ at least 15 times per hour; and uses ‘trauma-informed’ as a Trojan horse for American leftist politics.

Constant coddling, soothing, and praising statements are fired out to hundreds of thousands of complete strangers saying, “I love you”, “you are worthy”, “I am your biggest supporter”, “you deserve…”, “it’s not your fault”.

Not only is this wildly disingenuous because they don’t actually know the people to whom they are professing love, it encourages an unhealthy symbiosis between consumers who are seeking validation and coddling, and therapists who are seeking supply and clout.

It’s information overload.

The sheer volume of “if you overthink it’s trauma”, “if you’re stressed on Sunday evenings your boss might be a narcissist!”, “if you get overwhelmed it’s ADHD”, “if you sneeze at 7.30pm every second Tuesday of the month you’re anxiously attached- but also TRAUMA!”

The last one is obviously humour but it won’t be lost on purveyors of this content how farcical these statements have become. Breathing is now probably a ‘trauma-response’.

This conveyor belt of therapy memes with pre-packaged ‘insight’ (shockingly) isn’t helpful. It speaks to our culture of instant gratification amidst too much choice. God forbid we put in the work to discern what is actually going on for us- and now we don’t need to. We can just log into Instagram and find a meme that somewhat fits our experience. And if it doesn’t fit simply throw a fit in the comments section.

It distracts from what might be going on for us and puts the focus onto what an ‘expert’ is suggesting might be wrong with you. It’s the sort of credentialism that encourages disempowerment and an external locus of control, which many already seem to be struggling with.

It’s being used as a mechanism of avoidance. Actual therapeutic work is work. It requires great deal more investment than logging into Instagram and reading content.

Being overly invested in insta-therapy is a great way to feel as though you are doing something useful while in reality you’re doing little but avoiding yourself and actual introspective work.

It’s leading the discussion on mental health without actually talking about mental health.

What is actually presented is personal experience, spiritual ideas, pop psychology, wokeness, life advice and coddling & soothing statements.

When mental health is spoken about it’s almost exclusively limited to depression and anxiety. Rarely is there discussion around the realities of schizophrenia, bipolar, psychoses, personality disorders, actual PTSD, suicidality or the realities of living with a serious mental illness.

A popular catchphrase that’s bandied about is ‘break the stigma’, but in the same breath everyone (and their dog) is diagnosed with the omnipresent ‘trauma’.

And while an entire, extremely lucrative, industry has been created around “trauma”- actual PTSD is completely divorced from the conversation.

Self-diagnosis and creating an identity out of these diagnoses is actively encouraged. The north American ‘woke’ social justice oriented therapists’ refrain ‘self-diagnosis is valid’ seems to have little in terms of an underlying rationale apart from the fact that assessments with trained professionals cost money. And the predatory “boss babe” therapists mightn’t explicitly encourage self-diagnosis but they do make incessant posts subliminally suggesting you ought to diagnose yourself. ‘5 signs of anxiety’, ‘7 signs you are depressed’, and ‘8 signs you should buy my book’ is the subtext.

What is almost never discussed however is that this is entirely decontextualized knowledge. They may or may not be ‘signs’ (the correct term is symptoms) of a particular disorder, but whether you meet the diagnostic criteria for that disorder is rather more complex than if an Instagram post resonates with you.

If you’re confronted with a daily deluge of “this might be wrong with you!”, “that might be wrong with you!” (cinderelli! cinderelli!) you will internalise some of it.

Insta-therapy reminds me of shiny shop fronts in a busy marketplace where vendors are desperately hawking their wares with increasingly loud and mawkish strategies to bring attention to what they’re selling. Except these aren’t silk scarves and ceramic pots, it’s one size fits all mental health ‘knowledge’ that people think they can apply to their specific individual predicaments and ‘heal’.

I can’t imagine how this would accomplish anything apart from worsening mental health outcomes.

It is not a ‘response to the mental health crisis’.

I find this a rather arrogant excusal of the ethical disaster that is insta-therapy. I’d argue that therapists trying to get famous, hawk merchandise, and become tiktok stars IS the mental health crisis. Or least a very clear manifestation of it.