There are a few weeks of my life that I can hardly remember, as if my brain set them aside to protect my mind. 

Subsequently, for most of high school and college, I aspired to be a psychiatrist. It felt like the most direct way to help people: study, diagnose and treat. The idea was clean and clinical, where distress enters my clinic and dissipates with medication. However, somewhere between my first neuroscience lectures and late-night conversations with friends at USC, psychiatry and even psychotherapy — traditional talk therapy — began to feel incomplete.  

After all, if therapy was my ideal, why had I never gone? 

I believe that modern society has outsourced “listening” to professionals because our communities have failed. Generation Z, despite having the highest potential for connection, is known as the loneliest generation, as a 2025 study reported by GWI, a global consumer research platform, found that while 45% of Baby Boomer respondents felt lonely, a staggering 80% of Gen Z respondents felt lonely in the past 12 months. 

This renders therapy as one of the few places where emotional honesty is allowed, when, really, we need the tools of therapy — self-reflection, emotional literacy, communication — to be integrated into ordinary life.  

For many, access to a therapist can be limited by both structural and cultural factors, such as a lack of insurance and transportation or stigma about mental illness, respectively. Fortunately, therapy exists not only in the clinical setting. Hence, for many others, it might be found in less formal, but no less meaningful, spaces. 

Justin Baradi, a first-year graduate student at USC’s Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, emphasized that there is no single solution to mental health.  

“As long as the person feels like they’re getting the support they need, then it would be fine,” he said. “There isn’t one solution for everything … it really just depends on the person and what kind of help they need.” 

What helps one person can alienate another: Some clients need to be challenged, while others need to be heard without interruption. Then therapy, at its best, is greater than a standardized product — it’s an adaptive and profoundly human relationship. And if therapy is fundamentally relational, then its value comes from the quality of attention and the willingness to articulate what often goes unsaid. 

These “professional” and “clinical” skills are maybe more human and innate than we make them out to be. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean turning hangouts with friends into therapy sessions, expecting untrained people to take on clinical roles, or diminishing the role of therapists. 

There are experiences — trauma, mental illness, crises — that require professional support; therapists offer expertise and boundaries that cannot always be replicated in personal relationships. To suggest otherwise would be irresponsible. But positioning therapy as the only legitimate site for emotional processing isolates people from one another, which sets an unsustainable burden on both individuals and the profession.

Instead, it means redeveloping a baseline of emotional literacy: asking friends adequate questions, listening without immediately offering solutions and also being willing to admit, “I don’t feel okay,” without packaging it into something more acceptable. 

It also means finding healing and growth outside of an office, whether that’s in religious practice, in sharing poetry during open mic, in the rhythmic dribble of a basketball or in the Los Angeles sunshine. 

Sometimes the most effective “session” isn’t a conversation at all, but the solitary meditation of learning a guitar chord or the intimate exorcism of a journal entry. Therapy can happen in ordinary moments. 

Ultimately, the goal is to redistribute therapy’s foundations. Because if the only place we feel allowed to be honest is in a 50-minute session behind a closed door, then something greater has failed all of us.

Personally, there are occasionally, still, sudden reminders of misery — such overwhelming blue — that leak into and stain the negative spaces around me. 

And yet, after all these years, I never consulted a therapist, because I was lucky enough to have found people who are so strong and generous, choosing to see the worst versions of me and refusing to look away. I am lucky to have people who soak up my blue and flood my life with color: living proof that being witnessed and celebrated by those who love you is, inarguably, the most profound therapy of all. 

Soefae Chen is a sophomore writing about health and fitness culture in her column, “Vital Signs,” which runs every other Friday.