Your Therapist Is Not a Healer
The mental health industry has replaced spiritual transformation with managed despair — and turned your pain into a recurring subscription.
By Nick Holt
At best, your therapist is a speculator. At worst — and this is more common than we admit — they’re a fraud.
Not a con artist. Not malicious. But a well-credentialed imposter standing in for something deeper: the soul guide, the wise elder, the one who once led others through transformation.
That role no longer exists. It’s been outsourced to an industry that has turned healing into a business model.
Today’s therapist doesn’t offer transcendence. They offer management. Not because they’re evil, but because the system is. The modern mental health industry was not born out of timeless wisdom, but from the cracked pavement of late-stage capitalism.
And not the Adam Smith kind — where markets functioned on moral sentiment and reciprocity — but the bloated, financialised husk we inhabit now, where every form of suffering is captured, branded, and sold back to you as a service.
You’re not a soul in crisis. You’re an appointment time. A returning client. A recurring debit. And your therapist’s job — whether they know it or not — is to keep the invoice coming.
We’ve replaced the priest with the practitioner. We’ve taken the archetype of the seer and substituted it with a softly spoken, Medicare-approved technician. And yet we wonder why healing feels more like looping.
The industry sells itself as science. But it’s not. Psychiatry and psychology, in their modern form, are speculative frameworks. Diagnoses aren’t discovered — they’re debated, voted into existence, and listed in thick manuals that read more like theological commentaries than scientific truths.
There is no blood test for narcissism. No x-ray for trauma. These are metaphorical tools — useful in some cases, but sold as empirical fact.
And here’s the catch: if therapy worked the way it claimed, you wouldn’t need it forever. But healing doesn’t scale. Management does. A healed patient leaves. A “processing” patient returns. So instead of transformation, you get articulation. You become fluent in your pain, and mistake that fluency for freedom.
Therapy gives you vocabulary. It helps you narrate your patterns. It teaches you to name the wound. But it rarely asks you to leave the wound behind. You can spend five years talking about your mother, and still never forgive her. Or face her. Or let her go.
And when talking loses steam, there’s always a prescription.
We live in a culture that assumes any prolonged discomfort must be biochemical. If you feel numb, anxious, restless — you’re not responding to a dehumanising environment or a meaningless routine. You’re malfunctioning. Take the pill. Adjust the dose. Don’t question the premise.
Let’s be clear: medication has its place. For some, it can be life-saving. But for millions, it’s a sedative strategy applied to spiritual disconnection. It doesn’t heal. It dulls. And it’s sold by the same system that profits from your sedation.
Then there’s the language — the great smokescreen. Words like “boundaries,” “self-regulation,” “trauma-informed,” “inner child,” “neurodivergent.” These terms now dominate not just therapy rooms but everyday conversation.
They offer the illusion of clarity while often delivering abstraction. You’re not avoiding responsibility — you’re “honouring your nervous system.” You’re not stuck — you’re “in process.”
At a certain point, the therapy-speak becomes a shell. It replaces old dogma with new jargon. And it keeps people suspended in a state of narrative control — where healing is endlessly deferred, but always branded as imminent.
The most dangerous shift is this: your diagnosis becomes your identity. You don’t just have depression — you are depressed. You don’t manage anxiety — you become “an anxious person.” Pain is no longer something to move through. It’s something to organise your life around.
And so you build routines, friendships, content, and romantic expectations around pathology. You don’t evolve beyond your suffering. You brand it. You curate it. You turn it into a social currency that keeps you safely within your condition — and tragically out of your life.
This isn’t to say therapy is worthless. Some therapists are extraordinary. Soulful, brave, unafraid to confront. But the industry is not designed to reward those people. It’s designed to reward retention, compliance, and emotional maintenance dressed up as growth.
If your therapist hasn’t challenged you — not just listened, but really pushed you — in six months, you’re not healing. You’re renewing. You’re being professionally managed.
Healing is not tidy. It’s not weekly. It’s not jargon-filled. It’s certainly not infinite.
Healing is a reckoning. It’s an act of courage.
And sometimes, that courage starts with saying goodbye to the person charging you to stay stuck.