We are surrounded by what some now refer to as therapy-speak. From HR seminars to dating advice videos on TikTok, references to “trauma bonds,” “emotional boundaries,” and “anxious attachment” have become a fixture of popular culture. However, a new academic paper warns that this widespread cultural fluency in simplified and decontextualized therapeutic language, often marketed as self-help, may be undermining collective well-being.
In the European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling, researchers Arturo Bandinelli and Iris Aleida Pinzón Arteaga argue that the rise of therapy-speak is a defining feature of the “therapeutic turn.” This turn, they write, refers not to depth-oriented psychotherapy itself, but to the broader cultural trend of using therapeutic frameworks to individualize social suffering. The paper distinguishes between the nuanced, often self-critical traditions of psychoanalysis and the instrumentalized language of therapy now embedded in reality TV, corporate wellness programs, and online influencer culture.
Bandinelli, a London-based filmmaker, researcher, and psychoanalyst-in-training, and Pinzón Arteaga, a psychologist and doctoral researcher in sociology at the University at Albany, examine how therapeutic discourse has become a dominant cultural lens for making sense of pain, struggle, and social dislocation. Their work draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis and psychosocial theory to critique how this discourse circulates beyond the clinic and contributes to what they call the privatization of suffering.
Bandinelli and Pinzón Arteaga define the therapeutic turn as a cultural shift in which “psychotherapeutic discourses are employed to individualise suffering and neutralise symbolic contradictions.” In their view, this trend has transformed therapy into a tool for managing social unease rather than confronting its root causes.
As a counterpoint, they propose what they call “a psychotherapy against the Therapeutic Turn” as a form of practice that resists the cultural pull toward the individual self as the locus of explanation and instead questions the authority of therapeutic knowledge when it is used to pacify discomfort or depoliticize distress.
“In this respect,” they write, “our contribution may be inscribed within the broader attempt to build a critical corpus within psychotherapy,” one that pays close attention to “growing state influences on, and the ideological cooptation of, talking therapies.”
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