Paper Short Abstract:

Psychotherapy has evolved from an in-office encounter to one mediated by technology and private digital platforms. This presentation asks how mental health professionals "doing the work" in the US are becoming digital subjects and adapting to new reconfigurations of therapeutic labor.

Paper Abstract:

Psychotherapy has traditionally been an in-person encounter between provider and patient engaged in a dedicated time for paid attention for the purposes of therapeutic intimacy (Zeavin 2021). Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the expedited the growth of teletherapy and the increase in demand for mental healthcare in the United States has resulted in the massive growth of therapy platforms. These platforms promise to virtually connect patients to therapists, unburden providers from administrative work, use AI for some provider labor, and provide therapists with a consistent client base. From the entrance of asynchronous “text therapy” compensated per word to promises of seamless “matches” between client and therapist and the reality of the gigification of therapy work, therapists’ own subjectivity in this new clinical environment and labor market has shifted. Based on interviews and group sessions with therapists in the United States who work in telehealth and for therapy platforms, in this presentation I explore how digital care has significantly changed how practitioners “do the work” of psychotherapy, understand their own professional expertise, and earn a living. What does it mean to engage in “therapeutic seeing” through the mediation of technology? How is the “scaling-up” of mental health apps/services remaking social understandings of what is “therapy” and “therapeutic”? Reflecting on the dimensions of time/space, mind/body, attention/money that operate the psychotherapeutic space, I argue that the increasing shift to platforms and telepsychology re-signifies the meaning of therapy as a “technology of the self” and restructures mental healthcare as a psycho-social-technical apparatus.