Therapy-speak, or rather, an aversion to therapy-speak, is having a moment. It’s hard to know when it all began. Maybe a couple of years ago, when Jamie-Lee Curtis said the word “trauma” over and over during the press tour for Halloween Ends. Maybe it was a widely-shared article about ‘why therapy-speak is selfish’. Or maybe it was when Jonah Hill allegedly told his ex that posting photos of herself surfing would break his “boundaries”.
More and more, “therapy-speak is bad” is becoming a popular opinion. Words like “toxic”, “dysregulation” and “trauma-dumping” – expressions that used to stay in the therapist's office – have invaded our films, our friends, and now, it’s coming for our pop music. Ariana Grande’s latest Saturn Return album eternal sunshine, on which she sings about “codependency”, “therapy” and “self-soothe” in the same verse, proves it. As one early review bemoaned: “So we’re dealing with another album that’s full of therapy-speak.”
Kacey Musgraves also released Deeper Well, an album full of pop-psychology jargon, mystical stones and boundaries, that appears to be a product of Musgraves' Saturn Return. “I wanna bathe in the moonlight / Until I’m fully charged,” she sang on 'Jade Green’. Musically, the album was dynamic, gorgeous, surprising, but it was hard to ignore the overly neat therapy-inspired conclusions, its air of corporate spiritualism.
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Pop music was once the domain of shambolic desire and psychosexual mess. Everyone was crying in the club. No one could breathe. Romantic codependency, before we knew it by that name, was pop’s stock-in-trade. Now, the charts are dominated by singers taking accountability, examining their unhealthy coping mechanisms and attachment styles. From Noah Kahan, who sang: “So I took my medication, and I poured my trauma out / On some sad-eyed middle-aged man’s overpriced new leather couch” on ‘Growing Sideways’, to Benson Boone’s ode to finding his mind and sanity; Tate McRae’s “oversharing” to SZA paralysing “intrusive thoughts” – and not to mention, the forthcoming ‘radical optimism’ era of Dua Lipa – the glossary of pop therapy is replacing the language of traditionally chaotic romance.
It’s this simple: the age we live in is a therapeutic one. But other genres have been able to transmute it with far greater success and less resistance than pop. Intergenerational trauma, and the therapeutic attempt to reverse it, has been well represented in rap, from Dave’s Psychodrama to Danny Brown’s successfully self-reflective Quaranta. But pop music, it seems, has a limited imagination when it comes to the therapy plot. In most cases, therapy-speak has become lazy shorthand for emotional insight, a convenient way to fill in the potholes and plotholes of a star’s persona. It feels joyless – the stuff of human resources departments rather than real life, or even therapy. a place in which deploying ‘therapy-speak’ is not a substitute for emotional growth.
Music critic Meaghan Garvey finds the recent swell of critical backlash to this therapised moment in pop interesting, “given that what remains of music media has breathlessly incentivised this same mode as the primary framework for understanding art for a decade now.” Recent criticism, she argues, has consolidated itself around a “trauma plot,” a term popularised by the New Yorker’s Parul Sehgal to describe an influx of film and literature in which characters are defined by their psychological symptoms, made complete and comprehensible through their trauma. But it’s this trauma plot, Garvey says, that has become the “dominant paradigm in what passes for music criticism nowadays.” Today, critics tend to prioritise psychological readings over aesthetic judgements. “So it's no big surprise that artists lean into it, too,” says Garvey, “though I don't actually believe it's some kind of creative strategy — it's just how people are now, which is even worse.”
It’s perhaps not unconnected that the rise of therapy-speak in pop is occurring at the same time as the Uberfication of mental health, with AI therapy bots and apps like BetterHelp dominating the marketplace, while graphic designers on Instagram post nursery school-like infographics on how to interact with other people. “I think one very obvious contributing factor to the current therapy-speak moment is products like BetterHelp, the therapy app,” explains Jaime Brooks, a music journalist at the New Inquiry. “BetterHelp has been trying to use music and musicians to market themselves for ages now.” The most obvious example, she suggests, is BetterHelp’s partnership with Travis Scott in 2021. Following the death of eight people in attendance at his Astroworld festival (along with the injuries of many others), BetterHelp offered a month’s worth of free therapy to those in attendance. The likes of Hayley Williams, Logic, Justin Bieber, Lauv have also partnered with the therapy app, to coincide with the release of their more inward-facing albums. “One of the most important things that got me through was talk therapy,” Williams said in a campaign for BetterHelp the year she released her debut album.
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“I think therapy-speak is fundamentally corporate in nature,” says Brooks. It’s kind of Substack-brained conventional wisdom by this point: therapy-speak has less to do with identifying and curing a sickness than it does turning us into productive workers and consumers, willing to Goop our ways out of our misery. Therefore, it follows, says Brooks, that “therapy-speak is becoming more popular in music because music is becoming more corporate.” As small, independent companies are being consolidated into larger conglomerates, “the internal culture of the music business is becoming more corporate by default,” says Brooks. And we know what that means: Myers-Briggs personality tests and wellness retreats, often in place of fair renumeration and adequate workplace benefits. It’s a culture, Brooks suggests, that is starting to rub off on the artists themselves: “People who work at record labels and management companies probably started using therapy-speak before artists or songwriters did.”
At a time when celebrity narratives are as obsessed over as the music itself (you had to know at least a little about Grande’s love life in order to get a good handle at all on eternal sunshine; maybe the biggest draw to Taylor Swift’s upcoming album will be the anticipation of a hidden message about Travis Kelce) Brooks proposes that therapy pop provides a way for stars to micromanage their public images, to divorce themselves from any sense of actual messiness in order to appeal to potential brand partners. ‘Look we’ve done the work.’ It’s a cynical take yet it largely tracks: Grande is on excellent terms with Ultra Beauty, the distributor of her cosmetics line, and Sandbridge Capital, its core investors. Meanwhile, Musgraves is selling sweatshirts with “My Saturn Has Returned” on them, as well a Boy Smells candle collaboration with her song titles on them.
But therapy pop, as it currently stands, doesn’t really represent the therapeutic process at all. In therapy we embark on the near-impossible task of creating our own backstory, reducing our lives into metaphors and metonymies in order to create a language and narrative for ourselves. It’s the stuff of confusion and disarray and irreconcilable ambiguity that should be a perfect match for pop music. Instead, the genre that we now call ‘therapy pop’ is offering little more than banal platitudes. Self-soothe. Detach. Add candle to basket.
