This book examines the administration, governance, practice, and ethics of psychotherapy over the last two decades to develop a contemporary critique of the psychotherapeutic enterprise. Drawing on C. Wright Mills’s “sociological imagination,” and engaging critically with perspectives across sociology, psychotherapy, and allied disciplines, it argues that the enterprise remains profoundly myopic about the social conditions that produce and sustain much psychological suffering.

Building on the author’s earlier critique (and assessing what, if anything, has changed since then), the book argues that the psychotherapeutic enterprise is in the main “asocial”: it gives insufficient recognition to the ways the reasons for, and remedies to, much psychological suffering are rooted in society rather than the individual. It develops this argument through sustained analysis of psychotherapy’s commitment to individualism and “selfism,” its role in commodifying distress and professionalising help, its complicity in the expansion of “mental-healthism,” and its often inflated claims to scientific authority.

Dr Morrall is clear that this does not mean skilled help should not be offered to individuals, or that psychotherapists should be wholly engaged in social activism; rather, he repeatedly stresses that he is not “against therapy” but for “good therapy,” grounded in compassion and competence. What this does mean, he argues, is that psychotherapy should continue to offer skilled help to individuals while also cultivating social awareness and accepting a fuller social responsibility to address the public issues and social suffering that shape private troubles.

This compelling work will appeal to researchers and practitioners in psychotherapy, social work, the sociology of health, and critical psychology.

Peter Alan Morrall is an independent researcher and public speaker and former Associate Professor in Sociology and Health, University of Leeds, UK. His previous publications include: Social Crisis and Mental Health: Signs of Sanity (2024), Insane Society: A Sociology of Mental Health (2020), Madness: Ideas about Insanity (2017), Sociology & Health: An Introduction (2010), and The Trouble with Psychotherapy: Sociology and Psychotherapy (2008).