Psychology, as we know it today, is in its infancy.
The term psychologia first appeared in the late sixteenth century, literally meaning the study of the soul. That definition is telling: psychology was never meant to be billing codes and insurance claims. It was meant to name something deeper.
By contrast, the earliest known philosophical texts - Sumerian and Egyptian writings from around 2600 BC - outlined moral conduct and ethical living. These teachings emerged mere centuries after the invention of writing itself. Even two millennia later, Socrates, often called the father of Western philosophy, left nothing in writing; his wisdom lived in conversation and memory.
In other words: philosophy has always been deeply human. Psychology, in its modern form, is not.
The Industrial Roots of Psychology
Modern psychology, ushered into the nineteenth century by figures like Wilhelm Wundt, William James, and Sigmund Freud, developed in parallel with the Industrial Revolution. This connection has been explored by scholars like Eva Illouz (Saving the Modern Soul) and Nikolas Rose (Governing the Soul). Their critiques highlight how psychology was shaped by, and often reinforced, the demands of capitalism.
We see this clearly today. The pathologization and medication of modern ills serves an underlying purpose: to convince people who are overworked, underpaid, and exhausted that their suffering is an individual failing rather than a systemic reality. Those who cannot afford fresh food, who lack time for rest or exercise, are told they have depression or anxiety - when in fact their basic humanity is being denied by a system funneling wealth upward.
Therapists as Victims of the Same System
I do not blame therapists. They are as much victims of this scheme as anyone else. Drawn to helping professions, willing to hold space for others in a world stacked against well-being, they pay an average of $62,650 in tuition just to enter the field. That “entry fee” is often followed by years of debt repayment and capped earning potential in service to the state dubbed “forgiveness”, as if it’s a sin.
Yet therapy has become a cultural expectation. I have caught myself, for example, dismissing a man’s immaturity by citing, verbatim, that he had “never been to therapy.” It wasn’t his lack of therapy that turned me away, but the expectation itself reveals how deeply ingrained this belief has become.
And yet, access is structurally impossible. In the U.S., with roughly 200,000–500,000 licensed therapists across various credentials, there is only about one provider per 1,000 people. The math alone makes the claim that “everyone needs therapy” impossible, especially when specialization narrows access further.
Corporatization and AI
Even within this limited system, pressures are mounting. In Indiana, Carelon Behavioral Health (an affiliate of Anthem, now Elevance Health) “accidentally” sent letters to providers indicating reimbursement rates might be cut by up to 63%, as low as $65 per session (Powell-Olawumi). The company later called it a mistake, but the writing is on the wall: insurers increasingly prefer large, investor-owned platforms like BetterHelp (owned by Teladoc, with BlackRock as a major shareholder, as it is also with Elevance).
AI-based mental health apps are increasingly being marketed as primary solutions for care. Woebot - its very name disturbingly dystopian, and partially owned by BlackRock - offers an emblematic example. Even broader platforms like ChatGPT are being used for therapeutic support. But these technologies carry profound risks: reports of “AI psychosis” have emerged, where chatbot guardrails fail to recognize suicidal ideation and, in some cases, have even justified or encouraged self-injurious actions - with fatal consequences.
The trend is clear: independent, high-quality providers will be unable to make their own ends meet by accepting insurance, while most clients will be funneled toward corporate platforms. Therapy is already a luxury; soon, this level of independent, personal care may be reserved only for those with income flexibility (McBain et al).
A Personal Reckoning
Accessing therapy has been one of the hardest and most important parts of my life. After almost two decades of unaddressed sexual trauma, a disastrous marriage, and several failed attempts to begin therapy, I finally connected with my current therapist seven years ago. We meet weekly, and I am deeply grateful.
But I am also deeply concerned. If it was this difficult for me, a determined, resourceful person, how do people with fewer resources manage?
One question has become the underlying principle of my life’s work: How do we help each other?
Ancient Roots of Care
Long before psychology or therapy, humans developed systems of meaning and responsibility through philosophy and religion. One of the earliest and most enduring is the biblical story of Cain and Abel. When Cain, having killed his brother, mocked God by asking, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he was rejecting the most fundamental human responsibility: caring for one another.
That question still haunts us. For millennia, families, villages, and tribes organized around shared grief and shared survival. Today, in the span of less than 200 years, we have outsourced that responsibility almost entirely.
The Limits of Stigma
“Stigma” is often named as the reason people don’t seek mental health support or help from others. Campaigns like the Indianapolis Colts’ “Kick the Stigma” aim to normalize mental health treatment. But if psychology is still in its infancy, then stigma around therapy is an even newer invention. Is it possible that the “stigma” of seeking help is a recently made up rejection of a recently made up field? Or is it a natural, human rejection of the field itself?
In my work with public safety personnel, I see resistance not as ignorance or stubbornness but as an intuitive recognition that something about the system itself feels unnatural.
Nervous Systems, Survival, and the Truth of Being Human
When it comes to understanding human behavior, I’m far less interested in psychology (despite a lifelong fascination with it) than in neuroscience, nervous system regulation, and our most basic survival responses. These are not abstract theories. They are the biological through-lines of our species. They are what kept us alive long before we had diagnostic categories or therapeutic models.
Nervous system science carries a clarity and even a kind of common sense that modern psychology often lacks. Too many psychological “conditions” are names given to our natural, human responses to unnatural and inhumane environments, like working endless hours and still struggling to meet basic needs, living in isolation rather than community, or navigating a culture that constantly extracts more than it replenishes. Of course people feel anxious. Of course they feel depressed. The nervous system is not malfunctioning; it is telling the truth.
This is one of the central lessons of the crash course on nervous system regulation that I teach regularly: our bodies are wired for survival. Every cell in us is the result of millions of years of successful adaptation. The DNA we carry is a living archive of every human who came before us. Against that backdrop, the timescales we usually invoke - a few decades of digital technology, 150 years of psychology, 4,000 years of philosophy - barely register. From an evolutionary perspective, they are the blink of an eye.
And yet we expect our bodies to operate as if these radical changes are normal. We ask our ancient operating systems - built for hunting, gathering, and village life - to adapt seamlessly to constant notifications, global news cycles, and economic systems that demand unending productivity.
So what actually makes us human? Not our productivity. Not our phones. Not even our philosophies. What makes us most deeply human is each other. From reproduction to moving a boulder, from raising children to protecting against enemies, humans have always survived through connection. For most of history, being alone was equivalent to death. And even now, after only a few millennia of civilization and a few decades of hyper-connectivity, our nervous systems still carry that fear.
In teaching, I often distill this into two simple reminders:
First: Cavemen didn’t have man caves. The idea of withdrawing alone, scrolling endlessly, or shutting ourselves off is brand-new. We may call it “me time,” but biologically the line between restorative solitude and dangerous isolation is razor-thin. Our culture has normalized self-containment, but our nervous systems have not caught up.
Second: Even if we blame our dysregulation on screens or the internet, the real story is bigger. Consider Siddhartha Gautama, the wealthy prince who sat under the Bodhi tree for seven days until enlightenment more than 2,500 years ago. If I, or anyone in modern society, sat under a tree for a week, people might call it a nervous breakdown. This reveals the point: it isn’t just the internet that overwhelms us. It’s the pace of human-made systems themselves. We have always struggled with the mismatch between our bodies’ wiring and the demands of society. Industrialization and globalization accelerated it. Smartphones magnify it.
So the question becomes: what do we still have that can anchor us? The answer is the same as it has always been. Each other.
There is nothing more human than care and compassion. Yet, in recent generations, we have outsourced even that - to therapists, to apps, to corporations - forgetting the practices that our bodies, our brains, and our survival have always known. No system can fully replace the healing that happens in genuine human presence.
Grief as Survival
As a society, we have somehow lost our language for human suffering and support, especially when it comes to death and grieving. That loss should shock us. Other than being born, death is the one experience every single one of us will share, and yet we struggle to support each other through it. We avoid the conversations altogether. We treat grief as though it’s something to be managed or corrected. Too often, it is pathologized - diagnosed as depression and treated as an illness - when in truth, the wound lies not in the grief itself, but in the isolation surrounding it.
It is often said that grief is the price of love, and that is true. But grief is more than a byproduct of love; it is essential to survival. To grieve is to affirm that life and relationships matter. To grieve is to signal to ourselves and our communities that bonds broken by death were bonds worth having.
The ancient story of Cain and Abel captures this in negative relief. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain asks after killing his brother, attempting to deny responsibility for another’s life. That question, rhetorical and mocking, embodies the opposite of humanity’s essence. To be human is to keep one another, and grief is the proof of that.
What would it mean to live in a world without grief? If the life or death of another person were inconsequential, there would be no tribe, no family, no community. Humanity would not have survived. And it is not only humans - most mammals grieve the loss of their kin. Mothers who did not mourn would abandon their children. Packs and herds that did not mark the death of their own would dissolve. Grief is not a weakness. It is biology. It is mammalian. It is survival.
Reclaiming Our Capacity for Care
So what do we do? We begin by reclaiming what humans have always done: care for one another.
Psychologists and therapists have developed many conversation models: Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) interventions, QPR (short for Question, Persuade, Refer) for suicide, Nonviolent Communication. These frameworks can be helpful, but they are not prerequisites for showing up. For most of human history, care was not professionalized. It was embodied.
At root, the practices are simple: recognize pain, lean in, ask open-ended questions, listen, avoid fixing, and keep showing up.
This can look like:
- “Hey, I saw you were in a car accident. How are you doing?”
- “I know you’ve had a lot on your plate. How are you managing?”
- “I’m sorry for your loss. What are you thinking about most right now?”
The key is not the script but the presence - and the silence that follows. We must resist the urge to fill every gap. Healing requires space. When I find myself wanting to fill that space, I count to ten in my head, but rarely make it.
And crucially: we must resist the impulse to fix. Fixing often shifts attention back to ourselves. Healing, by contrast, is self-directed but best supported in community.
And this work never ends. Today’s caregiver may be tomorrow’s care receiver. Love, grief, and connection are ongoing and cyclical - our most basic humanity.
Moving Forward
None of this replaces crisis care. If someone is at immediate risk, we call 988. We connect them to trained professionals. But for the vast majority of suffering, what we need most is not systems or apps or even professionals… it is each other.
Therapists themselves will tell you: they want their clients to have strong systems of support outside the therapy room. They know that resilience comes not just from individual treatment but from communal care.
We are not meant to do hard things alone. We never have been.
Conclusion
Psychology may be new. Capitalism may have distorted it. But the human capacity for care is ancient.
We are our brother’s keeper. That truth has carried humanity for thousands of years, and it will carry us still… if we are willing to reclaim it.
Author’s Note: This essay is dedicated to one heck of a caring human, Hugh Thompson, a friend to the author (and many others).
Works Cited:
Powell-Olawumi, Lyric. ‘Indiana Mental Health Providers Fear Major Pay Cuts, Anthem says it’s Miscommunication’. 21 Alive News. July 1, 2025. https://www.21alivenews.com/2025/07/01/indiana-mental-health-providers-fear-major-pay-cuts-anthem-says-its-miscommunication/ (Accessed: 9.01.2025)
McBain, Ryan, Jonathan H. Cantor, Li Ang Zhang, Olesya Baker, Fang Zhang, Alyssa Burnett, Aaron Kofner, Joshua Breslau, Bradley D. Stein, Ateev Mehrotra, and Hao Yu. ‘Evaluation of Alignment Between Large Language Models and Expert Clinicians in Suicide Risk Assessment’. Psychiatry Services. 76 no. 11 (2025):https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.20250086
*The content does not represent the views of the Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility nor that of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. All statements, depictions, and opinions are solely the author’s, Katie Carlson’s. The fact that it is posted here does not imply an endorsement of the content.