Psychobabble: Viral Mental Health Myths & the Truths to Set You Free

“We need to talk about how we talk about mental health,” asserts psychotherapist Nucci in his penetrating if flawed debut. Tackling therapy-related myths popular on social media, he dismantles the idea that everyone needs to go to therapy—a belief that isn’t intrinsically harmful but can become so when it draws resources from those in real need of intervention; explains why expressing feelings isn’t always wise, especially for those prone to disproportionate emotional responses; and clarifies that not everyone gets depressed and anxious (pathologizing sadness and nervousness can make those normal emotions seem scarier than they are). In refuting these notions, the author sometimes stumbles into what sound like professional gripes with individual mental health influencers or fails to adequately addresses the issues involved. For example, an attempt to debunk the idea that all awkward people are neurodivergent devolves into a critique of how neurodivergence has been wrongly classified as a political and social movement. Still, many of the book’s core points—that it’s problematic when therapeutic jargon gets warped by the public, that not every therapeutic technique works for every patient, and that symptom overlap makes self-diagnosis a challenge—have merit. The result is a thought-provoking if uneven look at the challenges and complexities of a the public discourse around mental health. (Sept.)