All the time I was growing up, therapy was something rich Americans did or, more specifically, Woody Allen – who for many years channelled his real-life time spent on the couch into fertile film fodder, to be treated as something comedic, self-indulgent and ultimately futile.
For more proof if needed of Ricky Gervais’s maxim that "people now get famous living their life like an open wound", look no further than Couples Therapy (iPlayer), which since 2019 has seen real-life patients take their problems into the New York office of the calm, compassionate Dr Orna Guralnik.
Now the BBC’s Wellness Week is the cue for a bunch of leading UK therapists to follow suit and invite the TV cameras into their consulting rooms. Change Your Mind, Change Your Life’s first episode follows three people through their initial sessions: Nicole gets anxious when driving; Muna can’t face being left alone; James is a former athlete who has issues at work. One therapist explains the challenge of dealing with a patient whose "stories and emotions don’t match" and there’s clearly a Columbo-like satisfaction in digging around in a client’s childhood for the root of the problem.
Of course, such a TV format has its limitations. The very act of being filmed in such a sacred setting must raise questions about the motives of both patient and counsellor. Viewers versed in therapy-speak from a thousand podcasts will cringe at phrases like "you didn’t have yourself back then, but you do now" as a TV-friendly over-simplification of complex issues.
But this is the stuff of people’s lives. The terror of Nicole’s panic attack is palpable, as is her relief after a few well-chosen therapeutic words. It’s clearly good to talk, and no bad thing when we’re told one in four people in the UK will experience a mental health problem each year.
Quite how we’ve created a society where so many people tell themselves such a story is probably the stuff of a bigger conversation.
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