Therapized

We've never had so much help. We've never been in more anguish. That's the paradox.

Mental illness is (mercifully) no longer stigmatised. We're far more open than our grandparents were. Way more of us are seeking help. Why, then, are we being continually told that 'current levels of good mental health are disturbingly low'? If so many people are in therapy, why do we still have a mental health epidemic?

Cynics puncture the paradox by denying the reality of mental illness. The diagnoses are dubious, they say; sensitivity is masquerading as suffering . . .

But it's not the suffering which is suspect. It's the treatment. Yet while many books have questioned the efficacy of pharmacological interventions, strangely, the talking cure remains a sacred cow. What if therapy's not only failing to resolve the crisis but making it worse?

What is it about therapy that's exacerbating our problems? When the difference between True and False, Right and Wrong, Up and Down, becomes a matter of varying viewpoints, we are witnessing the triumph of the therapeutic. But is in fact psychology, from its Freudian inception and across its many contemporary modalities, marked by a chilling nihilism that is ultimately bad for our health? Therapized answers exactly this.

James Mumford is a writer and recovering academic. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the University of Virginia (UVa)'s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and was previously awarded a Visiting Fellow at the McDonald Centre in Christ Church, Oxford to begin work on this book-project. Before that James was a lecturer at UVa's philosophy department where he taught ethics.

James received a broad education. He received a double first in English Literature as an undergraduate at Oxford; was a viva candidate at All Souls, Oxford and was awarded one of two annual Henry Fellowship to study political and moral philosophy at Yale; returned to Oxford for his MPhil/MA and DPhil/PhD in theological ethics, with his thesis deemed sufficiently outstanding to be immediately published by Oxford University Press as Ethics at the Beginning of Life: A Phenomenological Critique. In 2020 Bloomsbury published Vexed: Ethics Beyond Political Tribalism, which was widely and enthusiastically reviewed in the UK.

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