Therapy, Coaching, and the Mental Health Machine: Built for White Supremacy, Built for Capitalism
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By: Lisa M. Hayes
Therapy, Coaching, and the Mental Health Machine: Built for White Supremacy, Built for Capitalism
The entire field of therapy and psychology is built on the foundation of white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism—and it shows. It shows in the way racism, generational trauma, and colonial violence are either ignored or pathologized. It shows in the way mental health is framed as an individual problem, never a systemic one. And it shows in the way therapists are trained to help people cope with exploitation, not dismantle it.
Therapy, as it exists today, is not about liberation. It is about assimilation.
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Western Psychology Was Never Built for the Colonized, the Oppressed, or the Poor
The mental health field did not arise from a desire to heal humanity. It arose from a desire to control behavior. The earliest psychologists weren’t healers—they were social engineers. They studied how to make workers more productive, how to diagnose and institutionalize people who didn’t fit into industrial society, how to classify “abnormality” in ways that just so happened to criminalize the poor, the colonized, the disabled, and the gender nonconforming.
• Freud pathologized indigenous spiritual beliefs as primitive and delusional.
• Carl Jung exoticized and stole from non-Western traditions while claiming Europeans had the superior psyche.
• The entire DSM (the diagnostic manual of mental illness) is built on a white, Western, capitalist idea of “normal.”
There is no neutrality in psychology. There never was. The field has always served the ruling class, not the suffering.
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Racism, Colonialism, and Trauma Are Not Mental Illnesses—But Psychology Treats Them Like They Are
If you are Black or brown and struggle with anxiety, depression, or rage, the system will ask you to look inside yourself for the cause. It will not ask you to look at historical trauma, structural racism, police violence, food deserts, wage theft, or the crushing weight of capitalism. It will ask you to do breathing exercises, take medication, practice gratitude. Anything except recognize that your pain is a rational response to an oppressive world.
The system does not want to heal you.
It wants to adjust you.
It wants to sand down your edges, quiet your rage, make you easier to manage.
Because if psychology acknowledged that capitalism, racism, and colonialism are the root causes of mass suffering, it would have to admit that healing isn’t about “self-care”—it’s about burning this whole system to the ground.
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Therapy as a Tool of Capitalism
Let’s talk about what therapy really does in a capitalist society.
Most people can’t afford therapy. Those who can often see therapists trained to get them back to work, not back to wholeness.
• Feeling anxious? Meditate and push through.
• Burnt out? Take a vacation and get back to the grind.
• Depressed? Have you tried manifesting abundance?
The entire mental health industry is designed to keep people functioning inside a system that is making them sick.
• It pathologizes rest.
• It criminalizes madness.
• It medicalizes the trauma caused by white supremacy but never holds white supremacy accountable.
There’s a reason therapy often feels like emotional customer service. It’s not a threat to power. It’s a tool of power.
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Coaching Is No Better—And Often Worse
If therapy is built to make people functional inside capitalism, then much of coaching is built to make them grateful for it.
Coaching doesn’t escape the grip of white supremacy—it marinates in it. While therapy at least acknowledges suffering (even if it refuses to name its true cause), coaching sells suffering as a personal choice. It turns trauma into a mindset problem, preaches productivity as a spiritual virtue, and pathologizes any way of thinking that doesn’t fit neatly into the optimized, hyper-efficient, capitalist ideal.
And while not all coaches push this, many do—especially in an industry where the loudest voices are often the ones making the most money.
The entire industry is steeped in rugged individualism. It tells people:
• You are 100% responsible for your own reality.
• If you’re struggling, it’s because of your thoughts, not your circumstances.
• Any failure is a failure of mindset, not of systems.
Coaching does what white supremacy and capitalism love most—it isolates people. It convinces them that their struggles are personal, their fault, and theirs alone to fix. It tells them to stop looking outward at racism, poverty, generational trauma, and systemic oppression and to start looking inward, as if the cure for oppression is just a better morning routine and a high-performance mindset.
And when people reject this, when their pain doesn’t fit into the mold, when their “low-vibration” emotions refuse to be coached away? Coaching has a name for that too:
• Limiting beliefs.
• Scarcity mindset.
• Playing the victim.
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The Business of Coaching: Wealth Over Community
At this point, coaching is primarily about making money. Coaches selling coaching to other coaches. Wealth-building masterminds. Six-figure weekend intensives. The coaching industry has become a self-replicating machine, designed to keep wealth circulating among those already positioned to access it.
The only mention of community in modern coaching is in paid communities.
• Connection is transactional.
• Support is gated behind a price tag.
• The doors are open—if you can afford the entry fee.
The coaching world talks a lot about alignment, success, abundance. But in practice? It sells individual exceptionalism over collective well-being.
It teaches people how to stand out, not stand together.
It teaches people how to profit, not how to participate in community care.
And white supremacy thrives on that. Capitalism thrives on that.
Coaching, as an industry, could be a force for actual change. But first, it would have to stop serving the same system it claims to disrupt.
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What Would Healing Look Like If It Weren’t Built for White Comfort?
If psychology and coaching weren’t serving white supremacy and capitalism, they would tell the truth. They would say:
• Your depression isn’t a personal failing—it’s a rebellion against an unlivable world.
• Your anxiety isn’t a chemical imbalance—it’s your body recognizing danger in a system designed to exploit you.
• Your trauma isn’t an isolated event—it’s an inherited wound from generations of colonialism and racial violence.
Real mental health care would dismantle systems, not just symptoms.
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Therapy and Coaching Can Be a Lifeline—But They Can’t Be a Revolution
This isn’t about saying therapy or coaching are useless. Some therapists and coaches do good work, resist the system, and help people survive. But survival is not the same as freedom.
White supremacy will let you heal just enough to keep you compliant. Capitalism will let you rest just enough to get back to work. Therapy will let you process trauma just enough to stop you from burning the house down.
Coaching will tell you the house is fine, as long as you believe it is.
Lisa Hayes is a life coach, writer, and editor of Confluence Daily, specializing in social issues, political issues, and mental health. Her work has appeared in publications like Huffington Post and Real Simple. She is also the Communications Director for a local fire department in Mexico and runs a life coach training program called The Coaching Guild.
