More People Have Therapists Than Ever Before, and That’s a Good Thing

Welcome to Culture Clinic, MedPage Today‘s collaboration with Northwell Health to offer a healthcare professional’s take on the latest viral medical topics.

It seems everyone knows someone — or several people — in therapy these days. What once was shrouded in taboo is now commonly talked about between friends and shared online.

Major shifts in attitudes toward mental health have led to more people than ever before going to therapy. According to 2024 CDC data, 14% of U.S. adults received counseling or therapy in the last year — up about 50% from the 9.5% reported in 2019.

Therapy speak is now part of the cultural lexicon, with people casually using terms like “boundaries” and “triggers,” and “holding space” in ways that wouldn’t have been common perhaps even a decade ago.

Young people have been at the fore of this change.

In previous generations, stigma about mental health was so strong that something would usually have to be significantly wrong for someone to seek out therapy. But Zachary Ginder, PsyD, MSW, a psychologist and healthcare administrator in Southern California, told MedPage Today that in his experience, Gen Z and Millennial patients view therapy as more like “a mental health tune-up.”

Rather than something reserved for crisis, they use it as an opportunity to explore and refine their identities and experiences, he explained. And while a level of stigma still exists for people of all generations — disproportionately among men, immigrants, and some cultural backgrounds — many patients now come to therapy pre-loaded with an idea of what’s going on and their goals for progress.

Different types of therapy top online trend cycles at different points, but Ginder said that “the relationship between the therapist and the care recipient is much more important than the specific modality, as long as the modality is evidence-based,” with exceptions for certain conditions.

There have been a few major contributors to changing attitudes toward therapy and mental health, the most recent development being the rise of telemedicine and the COVID pandemic, which Ginder called “a significant accelerator for help-seeking behavior.”

Several professional medical associations declared child and adolescent mental health emergencies during the pandemic.

“There’s always been a mental health crisis in youth, but there has been an uptick since the pandemic,” added Consuelo Cagande, MD, director of the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at Northwell Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, New York. Mental health diagnoses, particularly anxiety and depression, rose among adolescents from 2016 to 2023, according to the National Survey of Children’s Health.

Ginder added that in the early 2010s there was a spike in anxiety and depression among adolescents, which coincided with the rise of cell phones and social media. He called social media a double-edged sword. On one hand, public figures and regular people posting about mental health has made therapy seem more approachable and given young people an expanded emotional vocabulary — but there’s also rampant misinformation.

“There’s a significant proportion of mental health videos … where it’s either missing a piece or it’s completely false,” Ginder said.

While millions of people have therapists, even more people are not getting the mental healthcare they need — and the system is already struggling to keep up with current demands, said Scott Falkowitz, DO, medical director for Northwell’s school mental health program and a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in Glen Oaks, New York.

“There are these major shortages, especially in some of the communities who really do face the most need, like rural areas and underserved populations,” he told MedPage Today. As of the end of 2025, 137 million Americans — 40% of the population — live in a mental health professional shortage area, according to the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis.

Plus, many patients find it logistically difficult to get started with therapy. Internet resources, often outdated, can be a mess to navigate. And the cost of therapy can be another source of stress contributing to a patient’s mental health woes, Falkowitz said.

While the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 requires insurers and health plans to provide coverage for mental health and substance use disorders comparable to how they cover other kinds of medical care, Falkowitz noted that enforcement of this law varies state-by-state. Sometimes reimbursement rates for mental health services are low, which can discourage people from joining the mental health workforce. Ginder noted that hopefully younger generations’ positive experiences with therapy will inspire more people to join the mental health workforce.

Falkowitz said that continuing to build up the workforce, disseminating resources about mental healthcare, and making structural changes that empower more patients to access and pay for therapy are all important, but the government should also invest in initiatives that cultivate community and connection, which he views as the root cause solution.

“We know that connectedness matters,” he said.