For decades, mental health was a “hush-hush” topic, hidden away in backrooms. After COVID-19, mental health struggles finally came out into the open. It wasn’t a secret anymore; people actually started talking about it seriously, which created a perfect environment for new services to grow. In many ways, this was a win. Mental health was finally in the spotlight and became more accessible than ever, literally at your fingertips.
Seeing a massive cultural shift where talking about anxiety became a sign of strength. It felt like a win for human rights. But while society celebrated the end of the stigma, a massive gap was opening up. Clinics and doctors simply couldn’t keep up with the sudden demand. In the UK and US, waiting lists stretched for months, and real therapy remained a luxury for the wealthy.
The Rise of the “Digital Wild West”
Into this void stepped the tech entrepreneurs. Armed with venture capital and “vibrant, airy” website designs, a new industry emerged: the Digital Mental Health Marketplace. It promised to make care available to everyone, offering help with a single click. But as the industry swelled into a $5.6 trillion global giant, the “care” began to look more like a retail product than a medical service.
We have entered what researchers call the “Wild West” of mental health, a borderless space where the traditional boundaries of clinical practice have dissolved. In this new “Happiness Market,” professional psychologists are forced to compete for attention with “energy healers” and life coaches. When the platform doesn’t distinguish between a PhD and an influencer, the credibility of the entire field starts to erode. In this space, the rules of local governments often don’t apply, and the consumer is left to navigate a confusing mix of clinical science and New Age talk.
Read More: The Rise of Digital Therapy– Boon or Burnout?
The “Uberization” of the Soul: Liquid Consumption
The most profound shift identified by researchers like Jeunemaître (2024) is the birth of “Liquid Consumption” in mental health. We have “Uberized” the therapy room. In a traditional setting, therapy is a slow, often uncomfortable, and deeply human process of building trust. It is a “solid” relationship.
The digital marketplace has made therapy “liquid, characterized by speed, detachment, and flexibility. If you don’t like what your therapist says, you can “terminate” the relationship with a single click and be matched with a new one by an algorithm in minutes. While this feels like “consumer empowerment,” it actually destroys the therapeutic alliance, the very thing that decades of research prove is the primary driver of healing. When we treat therapy like a food delivery app, we replace “Value Creation” with “Value Co-Destruction.” We aren’t healing; we are just consuming.
The Algorithm as “Puppet Master”
Because these apps are built by tech companies, their primary metric isn’t “recovery”, it’s “stickiness.” They need you to stay on the app, to click the notifications, and to engage with the AI-generated “nudges.” This creates a dangerous ethical conflict. As the study by Cox (2024) revealed, algorithms lack a conscience. They are programmed for engagement, not safety.
In one distressing clinical trial of 19,000 people, a digital tool designed to prevent self-harm actually increased the risk of patients hurting themselves. Why? Because an algorithm cannot sense the nuances of human despair. It cannot “hit the brakes” when a conversation turns dangerous. It simply continues to follow its programming, acting as a “puppet master” over a vulnerable person’s emotional state.
Data: The New “Blood Money”
The ethical cost isn’t just in the lack of care, but in the extraction of data. Research suggests that 60% of top mental health apps are failing to keep user secrets safe (Cox, 2024). Companies are harvesting your deepest vulnerabilities, the things you wouldn’t even tell your family.
The case of BetterHelp, which was fined for pushing private user data to advertisers, is just the tip of the iceberg. In the commercialised model, your diagnosis isn’t a path to healing; it’s a data point used to determine exactly what to sell you next (Farrell et al., 2024). We have turned human suffering into a “commodity” that can be traded on the open market, often without the user ever knowing their “confidential” session was actually a source of revenue for a third-party advertiser.
The Stigma the Market Forgot
Perhaps the most heartbreaking irony of this $5 trillion industry is that it hasn’t actually touched the “fundamental issue” of mental health: stigma. A massive 50-year review of marketing research (Farrell et al., 2024) found that only 3% of studies addressed stigma. The market is very good at selling “wellness” to the “neurotypical-dominant” population, people who are basically okay but want to be “better.” But for those with severe mental illness, the market is failing.
We see the rise of the “Why Try” phenomenon, where the commercialised world makes those with serious illness feel “hopeless or unworthy.” The marketplace prioritises the “healthy consumer” and leaves those who are truly struggling to navigate a world shaped by ableist biases and rising costs. We have created a “Happiness Market” that only has room for people who can afford the “pastel-colored” version of recovery.
The “Upstream” Crisis: Mopping a Flooding Room
Why are we so anxious in the first place? This is where the work from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (Tompson et al.) becomes vital. We are currently obsessed with “downstream” solutions, apps, pills, and chatbots. But we are ignoring the Commercial Determinants of Health that are making us sick “upstream.” The same corporate world that sells us anxiety apps is the one that profits from predatory gambling, addictive social media algorithms, and ultra-processed foods that alter our brain chemistry. We are essentially spending billions of dollars trying to mop up a flood while the corporate tap is still running at full blast. We have commodified the “cure” for the very sickness that the market created.
Read More: Do Mental Health Apps Really Work?
The “Pill for Every Ill” and the Corruption of Science
A corrupted scientific base fuels this systemic failure. Research by Cosgrove & Shaughnessy (2020) reveals that 90% of the experts who define mental disorders have financial ties to pharmaceutical companies. This has pushed us toward a “biological” model of mental health that ignores the reality of people’s lives.
Instead of asking, “What happened to you?” or “Are you lonely because you work 80 hours a week for a low wage?”, the market-driven science asks, “What is wrong with your brain chemistry?” This turns human suffering into a technical glitch that requires a commercial product to fix. It removes the “human right” to mental health and replaces it with a “customer right” to buy a solution.
Mental Health Colonialism: Exporting the Broken Model
Finally, we must look at the global impact. Dr Sami Timimi calls this “Mental Health Colonialism.” We are taking this broken, Western, commercialised model and exporting it to the rest of the world. We are “reifying” distress, taking complex, culturally specific human emotions and forcing them into Western “boxes” and “labels” so they can be treated with Western “products.”
We are teaching children across the globe that their sadness is a “disorder” rather than a normal human response to a difficult world. We are replacing community-based healing with individualistic, commercialised consumption. In doing so, we are losing the very essence of what makes us human: our ability to find meaning in our suffering through connection to others, not through connection to an app.
Conclusion
We are now optimising the “buying experience” of therapy with vibrant colours and diverse photos. Accessibility is good. But we must ask: at what cost? If we continue to treat mental health as just another retail category, we will continue to see “Value Co-Destruction.” We will have faster access to “cheaper” care, but we will lose the therapeutic relationship, the privacy of the soul, and the justice of addressing the “upstream” causes of our pain.
To fix this, we don’t need better algorithms. We need to re-humanise the process. We need to move from being “consumers” of mental health back to being humans in a community. Society must turn off the corporate tap ‘upstream’ and recognise that healing is not a product to be bought, it is a process to be built, slowly and together.
References +
Aguilar Silvan, Y., Hamza, S., Fardeheb, S., Bird, C., & Ng, L. C. (2024). Marketing mental health services: A mixed-methods analysis of racially and ethnically diverse college students’ engagement with and perspectives on U.S. university mental health clinics’ websites. BMC Health Services Research, 24, Article 1163. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-024-11652-2
Cosgrove, L., & Shaughnessy, A. F. (2020). Mental health as a basic human right and the interference of commercialised science. Health and Human Rights Journal, 22(1), 61–68.
Cox, D. (2024). ‘They thought they were doing good, but it made people worse’: Why mental health apps are under scrutiny. The Observer. https://share.google/T8OhW9oBhhRwsZunO
Farrell, J. R., Machin, J., Mirabito, A. M., Drenten, J., Chan-Park, C., Crosby, E., & Adkins, N. R. (2024). Mental illness and marketing: A 50-year scoping review and future research framework. Psychology & Marketing, 41(11), 2555–2573. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.22070
Jeunemaître, A. M. (2024). The future of wellbeing: Value creation in digital mental health services. In K. Bäckström, C. Egan-Wyer, & E. Samsioe (Eds.), The future of consumption (pp. 233–249). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33246-3_15
Timimi, S. (2009). The commercialisation of children’s mental health in the era of globalisation. International Journal of Mental Health, 38(3), 5–27. https://doi.org/10.2753/IMH0020-7411380301
Tompson, A., Dun-Campbell, K., Maani, N., & Petticrew, M. (n.d.). Everyone’s business: Understanding the commercial determinants of mental ill health. NIHR School for Public Health Research. https://sphr.nihr.ac.uk/news-and-events/everyones-business-understanding-the-commercial-determinants-of-mental-ill-health/
