The Case Against Therapy

This provocative book dares to ask big questions about whether therapy is the answer to our mental health crisis...or if it’s merely escalating that crisis by failing to grasp what’s actually essential to a well-lived life. It’s a paradox. We’ve never had so much help. We’ve never been in more anguish. It makes you start to wonder: what if the cure for our mental health crisis isn’t more mental health care? That’s something James Mumford found himself pondering during a stay in a psychiatric hospital in London. He’d recently gotten a job teaching moral philosophy and a diagnosis of depression. And yet, sitting in a group therapy session, he found himself growing only more depressed. Because our mental health crisis, he realized, is in so many ways a crisis of meaning…and therapy just can’t answer someone’s deepest questions about how to live. A searing cultural critique, The Case Against Therapy argues that contemporary psychology ignores the ethical dimension of life at its peril. Tracing the history of therapy over the past 125 years, Mumford illuminates how and why it falls short, again and again, of its promise to help us cultivate purpose, find happiness, navigate relationships, reckon with shame, and grapple with so many of the common problems that send us to the couch in search of guidance. Worse, therapy’s values and assumptions have seeped into our culture at large, estranging us from the very resources that have traditionally helped humans find their way. An essential guide for anyone who’s tried therapy and still feels lost, The Case Against Therapy is a wise and rousing diagnosis of our present era and prescription for how to become a better, happier person.