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There is an old adage that “every therapist needs a therapist”. Even while the treatment was still in its infancy, Sigmund Freud said all psychoanalysts should “submit” themselves to being analysed. Recent cinema has been acutely aware of that painfully unbreakable cycle. In the likes of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Mary Bronstein’s hallucinatory Rose Byrne vehicle in which she plays a therapist and floundering mother caught in a downward spiral, or 2022’s Smile, in which a psychiatrist (Sosie Bacon) is pursued by a malignant metaphor for her poor mental health, therapists are as much at the mercy of their traumas as anyone else.

Rather than being relegated to supporting character status, as they long have been in everything from Good Will Hunting (1997) to The Sopranos, film is finally giving therapists their moment on the couch. Within the space of a month in UK cinemas, two more trick cyclists are taking on lead roles. Backrooms sees Renate Reinsve totally unravel from a secure, calm and collected psychiatrist and self-help author (albeit one who lives alone and subsists on a diet of lacklustre ready meals) to a nervous wreck attempting to navigate the uncanny corridors of her own mind. Meanwhile in Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life, a Francophone Jodie Foster takes on the role of shrink turned sleuth, deciding to investigate the death of a former client without realising she is trying to make up for her shortcomings as a spouse and parent.

The trigger behind this new onscreen parade of ailing therapist protagonists is in some ways obvious: more people are having therapy than ever before. A 2026 survey found that 37% of adults in the UK were seeking out their services, a 2% increase on the previous year. Despite being stigmatised a matter of years ago, therapy is now being branded “sexy”. The rise of the therapy influencer, or “TherapyTok”, has allowed these professionals and their jargon to transgress the boundaries of the therapist’s room into mainstream culture. Multiple podcasts have been dedicated to the topic, from pop-psychotherapist Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin? to the true-crime slash therapy podcast The Shrink Next Door, which may have provided inspiration to Zlotowski. Then reality television started to gleefully break with client confidentiality, with Couples Therapy, all contributing towards pushing the practice to the epicentre of the collective consciousness.

Even so-called therapy-speak has transferred into cinema. The critic Billie Walker points out dubious use of the lingo in psychiatric spinoffs of franchises such as the Nicolas Cage vampire flick Renfield (2023), in which the titular sidekick has the revelation that he has an unhealthily co-dependent relationship with Dracula. Beyond gimmicky character diagnoses, however, the cinematic reputation of therapists themselves has been steadily deteriorating for years. In Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010), an asylum’s menacing staffers may or may not be conspiring to bring down the upstanding detective Teddy (Leonardo DiCaprio). Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley (2021) depicted a therapist beamed in straight from hell, Dr Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), who extorts her rich clientele and tapes her sessions to use later in blackmail. And in Beau Is Afraid (2023), a fragile man-child’s therapist finally reveals themselves to be one of a coterie of his nemeses.

Perhaps this trope of the villainous therapist has graduated to a more rounded, reasonable portrayal of these practitioners. Film-makers have cottoned on to the fact that therapists are not, as Bronstein notes, “perfect”, impossibly self-sacrificing individuals like Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, but flawed human beings – their career choice of holistic adviser making them all the more interesting as a result. As a carer for her daughter, Byrne’s character Linda is at the end of her tether, unable to attend to her own needs let alone those of her patients. But in turn her own analyst (and boss), a vexed Conan O’Brien, who has his own life and defects to contend with, is unable to be there for Linda in the way she desires, creating an infinite chain of frustrated therapists.

What this new league of erring onscreen therapists have in common is that they exist in the realm of horror. The supernatural worlds these film-makers create are designed to mirror the spiralling negative thought patterns of their main characters. Whether a labyrinth of augmented memory in Backrooms, a magical asbestos-filled hole in the ceiling in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a trauma-hungry demon in Smile or a sinister hypnosis trip in A Private Life, the otherworldly parts of these narratives serve to enhance an atmosphere of claustrophobia, panic and dread. Though there have been rare comedy equivalents for therapist characters in recent years, such as Shrinking, in general these fictional shrinks live in a landscape of terror.

More so than the villainous therapist trope – which suggests our shrinks are out to get us – these newfangled therapists tap into a much greater fear. Since all people are faulty in unique ways and weighed down by their own personal baggage, how equipped can any one therapist be to properly deal with another person’s issues? It is telling that in each of these releases, the real sense of dread sets in when a previously self-possessed therapist loses their cool. While scepticism endures around therapy as an infallible cure to our problems, it’s unsurprising that we are seeing such bewildering anxieties projected on to the screen.