Welcome to Angerland

After a decade of researching the therapy industry I have finally formulated the elevator pitch for UberTherapy – ‘The Datafication of Despair: The extraction industry that games reality and offers magic solutions to the problems you never had’. I am supposed to feel happier than this.

The occupational hazard of researching UberTherapy is the rising panic at the size and speed of the uberization process taking place in the therapy sector. I have the feeling of being hurled around on a fairground ride, between the audacious game that is being played with our mental health and what I have come to see as the corrupted intention behind it. The dizzy and disorienting feeling that the ride is about to crash and burn as I race to write this down before the delinquent teenagers in charge of the therapy rollercoasters slam on the brakes and hurl us dangerously in the wrong psychic direction. Watching indifferently as we scream ‘go- faster- go- faster- no- stop’, smoking cigarettes and chatting up girls without a responsible adult in sight.

As the exaggerated claims of digital health technologies become absorbed into our culture, I find myself in a hall of mirrors, distorted by an idea of therapy I know not to be true offering therapeutic unicorns and guaranteed recovery from being myself. Looking into the digital mirror I wonder at whether I am having an AI hallucination where the therapy Large Language Models (LLMs) and their generative AI (GenAI) offer an instant way out of seeing myself as I really am. A digital Rorschach Test1 that misinterprets me by joining my biometric ink dots into a pattern that does not, psychically speaking, exist. As they churn out nonsense- making diagnoses and interpretations, my memories of the psychic facts of my life start to fade, where correlation replaces causation in the story of my life.