By Ten years ago, telling someone you were in therapy was still a disclosure — something you chose to share or not, something that carried social risk depending on context. Now people announce their therapist’s name in podcasts, joke about their attachment styles on TikTok, and talk about their CBT homework over lunch. Something genuinely shifted.
Whether that shift is straightforwardly good — and I think it mostly is — it’s worth understanding what actually changed and what the limits of the shift are.
How We Got Here
The destigmatization of therapy happened through multiple channels simultaneously. Celebrity disclosure played a role — athletes, musicians, and public figures speaking openly about therapy normalized it in a way that abstract public health campaigns couldn’t. The pandemic forced a national reckoning with mental health that made it harder to maintain the fiction that struggling was a private failing rather than a human experience. And social media, for all its documented effects on mental health, also created spaces where people talked honestly about their inner lives in ways that reduced isolation.
Gen Z and younger millennials are the most therapy-positive generations in recorded polling history. Significant majorities say they would seek therapy if they felt they needed it, and many already have. The question has shifted from “would you consider therapy?” to “have you tried to get an appointment lately?” — which is a different problem entirely.
What Changed in the Culture
The vocabulary of therapy has become part of everyday language in a way that’s genuinely new. “Setting boundaries,” “unpacking,” “triggering,” “holding space,” “trauma response,” “nervous system regulation” — these terms have migrated from clinical contexts into casual conversation, from therapy offices into group chats and Instagram captions.
This linguistic shift is more complicated than it looks. On one hand, it represents real cultural progress — a broader vocabulary for interior experience is genuinely useful, and reducing shame around talking about mental health saves lives. On the other hand, clinical terms stripped of their clinical context can be applied imprecisely in ways that dilute their meaning or, in some cases, pathologize ordinary human experiences.
There’s a version of therapy culture that helps people understand themselves and treat themselves and others with more care. There’s another version that becomes a framework for avoiding accountability (“I can’t help it, that’s my trauma”), or for medicalizing ordinary difficulty, or for performing wellness rather than pursuing it. Both versions exist, often in the same person, often on the same day.
The Access Problem Nobody Wants to End On
Here’s where the conversation has to go, even though it’s less satisfying than celebrating cultural progress: the normalization of therapy has outrun the supply of therapists.
Waitlists for therapists who take insurance — in most American cities — now run months. Many therapists have moved to private pay only, which prices them out of reach for most working-class and even middle-class people. Teletherapy expanded access meaningfully, but the total number of licensed mental health providers has not kept pace with demand. In rural areas, the situation is often significantly worse.
The cultural message “it’s okay to get help” has arrived. The infrastructure to deliver that help to everyone who wants it has not. That gap — between normalized need and inadequate supply — is where a lot of people are sitting right now: convinced they should be in therapy, unable to get a timely appointment, and watching celebrities talk about their therapists on podcasts.
The destigmatization was necessary and worth celebrating. It’s also not sufficient. The supply-side problem is a policy problem, not a cultural one, and it requires the less-glamorous work of funding training programs, expanding insurance coverage, and building community mental health infrastructure. That work is happening too slowly.