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Millennials are the most therapised generation yet. So why aren’t we happy?

Unthinkable: A little more pop philosophy may help with our simultaneous over-immersion and poor literacy in pop psychology

We engage with therapy as though it’s a culture when really it is a process by which theory becomes praxis. Photograph: iStock
We engage with therapy as though it’s a culture when really it is a process by which theory becomes praxis. Photograph: iStock
Laura Kennedy's picture
Laura Kennedy
Mon Aug 12 2024 - 06:00

Scrolling through social media is an education in therapy culture. My generation – millennials, as well as the one that follows us, Gen Z – is the most therapised by far. For us, therapy is less taboo than it was for our parents and, at least in theory, it’s more accessible, provided you can pay for it. We’re highly attuned to our own mental wellbeing and we have the language to talk about it.

Even those of us who haven’t availed of psychological and psychotherapeutic services still routinely use language more appropriately found in a therapist’s office. It has been absorbed into popular culture. We are the people who consume content online about parting from “toxic” friends and prioritising those who “show up” and “hold space” for us. We gorge ourselves on masses of “self-actualisation”-based therapised social media content while, in practice, much of it subverts the language of mental healthcare to justify unhealthy self-obsession and the maximisation of our own comfort to the detriment of our wellbeing.

[ ‘My friend’s toxic ex is back and I can’t keep listening to her complain about him’ ]

We rely heavily on diagnostic labels as a form of personal identity – everything from mood disorders to neurodivergence to informal labels such as “burnout” and “highly sensitive person”. While we’re more adept with the lexicon than any generation to date, we are also unprecedentedly unhappy. An NHS survey of children and young people’s mental health found that 23 per cent of 17- to 19-year-olds surveyed had a probable mental disorder in 2023, up from 10 per cent in 2017.

There are plenty of systemic and material reasons for us to feel unhappy and many factors that materially affect mental health – it isn’t some inherent weakness within people born after 1985 to which our more robust parents were luckily immune. Poor mental health is often a rational correlate of so many elements of life that are out of our control – economic instability, cultural factors, poor access to healthcare and the fact that the future is not currently something we have a robust sense of. It’s difficult to make decisions and feel secure when so much can seem unpredictable and in flux. It isn’t easy to be young right now (and the oldest millennials are not “young” by any stretch). Therapeutic language is deeply important as a specialised tool to help the people who really need it.

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One of the useful elements of philosophy as a discipline is that it considers ideas not just in isolation, but the holistic networks of ideas that come to construct systems of belief – theories of how the world works, or how people do, that we rely on to form beliefs about reality. It can consider theories in comparison to one another and contrast them, enabling us to think about how they relate or conflict, how they support or undermine one another. How true they may be and whether they help or hinder us in reaching a sound understanding. A little more pop philosophy may help with our simultaneous over-immersion and poor literacy in pop psychology.

Often, especially within the virality of online culture, theory-specific language from one conceptual universe can turn up outside its original domain in ways that change its meaning. “Viral” is a nice example – a medical term we now use to describe the means by which a video of babies interrupting their dad’s BBC interview can become briefly ubiquitous. We’re particularly guilty of doing this with therapeutic language. It’s a lexical sleight-of-hand trick in which we routinely replace a useful concept – such as trauma – with something more ambiguous so that instead of applying it to a survivor of terrible abuse or perhaps a near-death experience, we borrow it to describe and fortify the emotional legacy of much more commonplace and difficult (but not necessarily traumatising) experiences. We borrow terms such as “attachment styles” that originate in the psychological literature to describe the dynamic between a child and their caregiver, and apply them to adult romantic relationships as though they are an objective lens through which to consider what we need most in a prospective life partner.

[ Challenging myths about . . . PTSD ]

All of this stems from our engagement with therapy as though it’s a culture when really it is a process by which theory becomes praxis – a way of taking concepts and ideas and then actualising them in the world through our behaviour. Not just to feel better, or safer or more comfortable but to become a better version of ourselves to the benefit of everyone in our lives. “Therapy speak” is generally best left to therapists.