w w w . on l in e t h e r a p y instit u t e . c o m
prosperous, urban middle class, anyway) for selfdevelopment. The weekly hour spent in the office of your therapist, anguishing over your private demons, was a time-honored way of being ushered finally out of your benighted childhood and into the rarified precincts of true maturity! Almost nobody thinks this way anymore. First of all, people seeking psychological help don’t think of themselves as “patients,” or even “clients,” as much as they consider themselves consumers or customers. They want to be served what they want, on their terms, and at their convenience. When they have emotional or relationship problems, they look for a quick, effective solution that will help them get through a tough time, and old-fashioned therapy may not be at all what they think of first. They are not necessarily interested in an intense, open-ended relationship with a highly trained stranger, but a useful, practical, appealing, and reasonably priced product that will provide some relief and maybe a little long-term wisdom.
like a good way to do it. But, why is the old model less attractive to young people than it was and is to therapists their parents (and grandparents) age? The answer seems to me to be that it simply is not in synch with the huge social and cultural shifts in the way people now tend to think about therapy and therapists. Twenty and thirty years ago, it seems fair to say, the therapist was a revered person in the community, akin to a kind of secular priest. Individual therapy was a privilege, an almost iconic rite of passage (among the educated,
One reason for the increasing impatience with standard therapy (besides cost, of course) is our Internet-reinforced demand for instant gratification. Last year my Mother-in-law was ill and we needed some help dealing with her dementia. I had spent 10 years working with the geriatric psychiatric population, but when it was my family’s problem, I wanted information quickly. Therapy might have helped us through the crisis, but it would have taken a lot longer than the hour I spent searching through the web to find helpful resources, including free checklists and articles, as well as some downloadable material I could purchase online. Today, anybody facing virtually any life challenge can do the same thing—go online and within T I L T MAGAZ I N E J ULY 2 0 1 1
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