Welcome to the Madden America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.

Dr. Elizabeth Cotton is Associate Professor of Responsible Business at the University of Leicester,

and the founder of surviving work,

which carries out socially engaged research on mental health and work. She has worked with

health teams and trade unions, practiced as a psychotherapist in the NHS, and now runs the

Digital Therapy Project, a group of UK and US researchers studying the future of therapy

from both sides of that relationship. In her new book, Uber Therapy, the new business of mental

health, she explores the effects of reorganizing mental health care around the logic of the app

store. So therapy is now something you can scroll through on your phone or match with in seconds,

rate like a ride share.

These platforms promise frictionless access and personalized care, but what's harder to see

is how this new mental health marketplace is reshaping what therapy is and how it feels

and wood is even really built to serve.

She traces how public austerity and platform capitalism have combined

to turn mental health care into a set of digital products, governed by algorithms, data extraction

and dynamic and even dynamic pricing. In this world, qualified human therapists are slowly

being displaced by AI-driven solutions, while those who do remain are pushed into precarious, low-paid platform work.

Uber Therapy is part political economy, part insider account of therapy work,

and part literary exploration of what it actually feels like to bring our most distressed

versions of ourselves into these

mental health apps. In our conversation, we talk about the politics and business of digital

mental health, the lived and embodied experience of being both therapist and patient in this

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