Psychotherapy in Unsettled Times: How Therapists Mediate Between Collective Crises and Personal Distress

• In Event: Sociology of Mental Healthcare

Abstract

Psychotherapy has long been critiqued for turning individuals inward and away from civic life. Drawing on 40 interviews with therapists in the San Francisco Bay Area, this article revisits this debate in the context of converging societal crises—including global political unrest, climate-related disasters, and public health emergencies—to examine how large-scale crises surface in therapy and how therapists, themselves living through the same crises, navigate their role as mediators between collective crises and personal distress. I argue that therapists in this study move clients immobilized by crisis toward collective engagement through four key phases of the therapeutic process: (1) validating crisis-related distress as a reasonable response; (2) stabilizing clients through co-regulation, coping, and containment strategies; (3) reorienting clients by linking personal troubles to social structure and clarifying values; and (4) mobilizing clients toward restored functioning or collective engagement, depending on their proximity to threat. The findings illuminate how mental health care is adapting under conditions of contemporary macro-level crises. More broadly, they challenge critiques of psychotherapy’s individualism by showing how therapists actively bridge the personal and the political in clinical practice.

Author

• Shio Lim, Cornell University