James' World 2

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In recent weeks, Dr. Kali Cyrus has struggled with periods of exhaustion.

“I am taking a nap in between patients,” says Cyrus, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University. “I’m going to bed earlier. It’s hard to even just get out of bed. I don’t feel like being active again.”

Exhaustion is also one of the top complaints she hears from her patients these days. They say things like, “It’s just so hard to get out of bed” or “I’ve been misplacing things more often,” she says.

Some patients tell Cyrus they’ve been making mistakes at work. Some tell her they can “barely turn on the TV. ‘All I want to do is stare at the ceiling.’ ” Others say they are more irritable.

While some people who have had COVID-19 report brain fog and fatigue as lingering symptoms of their infection — what’s known as long COVID — mental health care providers around the U.S. are hearing similar complaints from people who weren’t infected by the virus. And many providers, like Cyrus, are feeling it themselves.

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There are many simplistic but entertaining binaries by which to classify the types of people in the world, but one I find to be instructive is whether you believe in therapy. On the one hand, there are people like me, who exist in a somewhat constant state of telling people that they ought to at least consider seeing someone professionally. (I’ve personally found it so worthwhile that I don’t even think my friends need to have “real” problems to try it.) On the other hand are people like my mother, who just last week asked me, “Are you still seeing your … person? Aren’t you healed by now?” This may (doubly) explain why I am such a susceptible audience for Lori Gottlieb’s 2019 book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. The subtitle—A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed—makes clear that this book will attempt to invert our normal perception of therapists by putting its subject on the couch.

Gottlieb became a therapist relatively late in the game. As she chronicles in the more memoir-y sections of the book, she had several previous careers, including a false start in medical school and a long period as a journalist, before she decided to go back to school to become a clinical psychologist. Today, she combines journalism and therapy, most notably in her “Dear Therapist” advice column for the Atlantic, which itself somewhat makes the argument for therapy based on the fact that the questions are often far too complicated ever to be answered in the span of one response, though Gottlieb does her best. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone counters this particular issue by following a small handful of Gottlieb’s patients’ therapeutic journeys alongside her own journey as a therapist and as a patient.

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Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by KatarzynaBialasiewicz/iStock/Getty Images Plus.

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