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

Welcome back. This is part two of my conversation with Elizabeth Cotton, author of Uber Therapy.

Elizabeth is a sociologist, therapist, and longtime labor organizer.

And in part one, we talked about hair and teeth, her name for the vulnerable, shame-prone

parts of the self, and we talked about what it was like to bring that part of herself to

the book and to these different

digital therapy applications.

And part two, we're going to pick up on the bigger story, how austerity politics and platform

business models are pushing therapy towards this short-term measurable care and how people's

data is becoming the product and how therapists are being

pushed into low paid and insecure work on these platforms. And then we'll come back to the big

question, what kind of help are these systems actually built to deliver? And what kind of help do we

really need? What is real therapy and how might we protect it? Welcome to Part 2. You talk about how

the marketing around these forms of therapy is that they're highly personalized, right? Part of the way

that that gets set up is that through using your data, they can market to you, you know, exactly

what you think you might need

or something like that. But that it's actually a really depersonalized form of therapy. I love

the way you say this in the book. The quote is that you can have everything you want as

long as it's what you call ICBT light, which you call a cheap and politically convenient

model of therapy that defines the problem at the level of the individual and their cognitions and behaviors. So what is it about this particular form of

therapy that's becoming ubiquitous? And why is it ubiquitous? Why is it the only form of

therapy being offered on these platforms? And how does this form of therapy actually prevent

...