The origins of UberTherapy in the UK lie in the NHS and in the creation of the flagship mental health programme Increased Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT). IAPT is a story of the ambitious campaign to set up a system of widely accessible publicly funded therapy in the UK in the early 2000s. In and of itself a great idea, but over 15 years later it is legitimate to ask if we set ourselves up for failure because its political and financial foundations drove us like a juggernaut into a future of platformization, the digiceutical sector and a series of therapeutic cul- de- sacs.

In this chapter I argue that the IAPT model was founded on a systematic degradation of public mental health services to facilitate the shift from a clinical logic to a financial logic. It does this by introducing a system of psychic pilates, where services focus on the employed and people who can pay- as- they- go or are covered by private medical insurance, losing the rest somewhere on hold to a call centre through attrition by design in services. Uberization is not just about privatization of previously public health services, it is the creation of a precise financial logic across services (Layard et al, 2006) based on the erosion of free- to- access public mental health services replaced by a digitalized, automated and medicalized system of standardized care, delivered by private digital healthcare providers.

The policy backdrop to IAPT was austerity (Konzelmann, 2019) that rallied calls for us to work harder, indelibly linking into policy and practice the virtues of being both healthy and employed. Despite the distress associated with austerity,1 we allowed ourselves to become locked into populist narratives about who deserves care and who does not based on an idea of work and therapy being good for us.