(Tele)therapist, Platform Worker, Data Manager: Therapeutic Labor and the New Therapeutic Exchange

The mental health care profession is undergoing significant shifts as it increasingly moves online and more people engage in psychotherapy through mental health platforms. This article examines how US-based therapists experience the transformation of their work as they are recruited into the economic, technological, and labor arrangements of the digital economy, in a new type of therapeutic exchange. Engaging new forms of therapeutic labor, therapists become (a) teletherapists managing the affordances of virtual care, (b) platform workers subject to algorithmic management that renders their work fungible, and (c) managers facilitating the collection of data upon which platforms rely. The reshaping of therapeutic labor in platform therapy is affecting how therapeutic work is done: the psychotherapeutic profession, the relationships that can be established with clients, and the outcomes and expectations placed on the therapeutic process itself. Drawing on interviews and group sessions with mental health providers who work on therapy platforms, I examine how therapists contend with this triple transformation, showing how platform therapy is embedded in processes of platformization, datafication, and financialization to deliver the promise of “on-demand” mental health care.