Therapy individualizes oppression
The therapeutic industry has achieved something remarkable: it has convinced the oppressed that their suffering is a personal failure requiring individual correction.
The conversion mechanism
When systemic exploitation produces psychological distress, therapy redirects attention from the system to the self. Workplace burnout becomes “anxiety management.” Economic precarity becomes “financial stress coping strategies.” Social isolation becomes “attachment disorders.”
This is not accidental. It is the precise function of therapeutic individualization.
The conversion follows a predictable pattern: systemic cause → individual symptom → personal responsibility → self-improvement solution. Each step moves further away from structural analysis toward personal pathology.
Pathologizing normal responses
Depression in response to meaningless work is pathologized rather than recognized as rational assessment. Anxiety about economic insecurity is treated as disorder rather than appropriate reaction to genuine threat.
The therapeutic framework assumes that healthy individuals should adapt to any system. If you cannot adapt, you are dysfunctional. If the system causes you distress, you need therapy.
This creates a curious inversion: the more accurately you perceive systemic problems, the more likely you are to be diagnosed with mental health issues.
The adjustment imperative
Therapy’s fundamental goal is adjustment. Not system change, not structural analysis, not collective action—adjustment. You must learn to function within existing arrangements.
“Resilience” becomes the highest virtue. “Coping mechanisms” become essential skills. “Acceptance” becomes psychological health. All of these orient the individual toward accommodation rather than resistance.
The question “How can I change this situation?” is redirected to “How can I better accept this situation?” This redirection serves existing power structures perfectly.
Economic capture of distress
The therapy industry has commodified psychological suffering. What was once addressed through community support, social bonds, or political action now requires professional intervention and individual payment.
Distress becomes a market opportunity. The more systematic the oppression, the larger the therapy market. Economic anxiety, social isolation, and workplace exploitation generate billion-dollar treatment industries.
This economic capture ensures that solutions remain individual and paid rather than collective and free.
The privilege filter
Therapy is predominantly accessible to those with economic resources. This creates a selection bias in both practitioners and discourse.
Working-class suffering often cannot afford therapeutic individualization. It remains visible as what it is: the result of economic exploitation. Middle-class suffering gets therapeutized, analyzed, and individualized.
This filtering process protects systemic analysis from contamination by individual focus. The most articulate critics of the system are redirected into personal improvement projects.
Pseudo-radical therapy
Some therapeutic approaches acknowledge social factors while maintaining individual focus. They recognize oppression but still treat responses to oppression as personal problems requiring individual solutions.
“Trauma-informed” approaches often fall into this category. They understand that trauma has social causes but maintain that healing is an individual process requiring professional guidance.
This pseudo-radical positioning allows therapists to appear socially conscious while maintaining the fundamental individualization of structural problems.
The self-optimization trap
Modern therapy increasingly overlaps with self-optimization culture. Mindfulness, cognitive behavioral techniques, and emotional regulation become tools for better system adaptation.
The goal shifts from mental health to mental performance. You should not only accept oppressive conditions but optimize your functioning within them.
This represents the completion of therapeutic capture: the oppressed become willing participants in their own optimization for systemic exploitation.
Collective alternatives suppressed
Historically, psychological distress was often addressed through collective mechanisms: mutual aid, community organizing, religious communities, extended family networks, labor unions.
These collective approaches naturally led to structural analysis and group action. If everyone in the community is suffering from the same source, the focus remains on the source rather than individual pathology.
The therapy industry has systematically displaced these collective alternatives with individual professional relationships.
The therapist class interest
Therapists have professional interest in maintaining individual rather than structural focus. Their expertise, income, and social status depend on psychological problems being individually solvable through professional intervention.
Structural solutions would eliminate the need for much therapeutic intervention. Community solutions would bypass professional gatekeeping. Political solutions would redirect resources from individual treatment to systemic change.
The therapist class naturally tends toward frameworks that maintain their social function.
Medication as final individualization
Psychiatric medication represents the ultimate individualization of oppression. Social problems become brain chemistry problems requiring individual chemical adjustment.
The medicalization of distress completes the process of removing attention from systemic causes. If depression is a serotonin imbalance, then economic inequality is irrelevant to treatment.
This biological reductionism protects systems from criticism while creating massive pharmaceutical markets.
The resistance paradox
Therapeutic individualization creates a paradox for resistance. Those most capable of systematic critique become focused on personal improvement. Those most psychologically damaged by systems become convinced the problem is internal.
Meanwhile, those who benefit from oppressive systems remain psychologically functional and thus avoid therapeutic individualization entirely.
This distribution ensures that systemic analysis comes primarily from those least psychologically equipped to pursue it effectively.
Alternative value frameworks
Real alternatives require abandoning therapeutic individualization entirely. This means:
Recognizing psychological distress as often rational response to irrational systems. Prioritizing community support over professional intervention. Focusing on structural change rather than personal adjustment. Understanding mental health as social rather than individual phenomenon.
These alternatives threaten the entire therapeutic industry structure.
The institutional protection racket
Therapy has become an institutional protection racket. It absorbs and neutralizes the psychological costs of systemic oppression while protecting the systems that generate those costs.
Every dollar spent on individual therapy is a dollar not spent on structural change. Every hour spent in individual healing is an hour not spent in collective organizing. Every person convinced their suffering is personal pathology is a person removed from systematic resistance.
This is not conspiracy. It is simply how institutional interests align.
The therapeutic industry’s greatest achievement is convincing the oppressed that liberation requires individual payment to professionals rather than collective action against systems.
This individualization serves existing power structures perfectly while generating massive markets from the psychological costs of oppression.
Real mental health requires structural health. Real healing requires collective liberation. Everything else is just adjustment training for systematic exploitation.