The individualism of modern society and the increasingly rapid and disruptive rate of social change brings about a situation in which for increasing numbers there is no overall shape to the moral life but only a set of apparently arbitrary principles inherited from a variety of sources. In such circumstances the need for public criterion for uses in settling moral and evaluative disagreements and conflicts becomes ever more urgent and ever more difficult to meet. 

~Alisdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics

In the summer of 2023, the surfer Sarah Brady published a series of text messages between herself and Jonah Hill in which he had presented a list of conditions that he required if they were going to keep dating. Most of them pertained to her relationships with other men and how much skin she was going to show on social media. The tone of the message was honest and direct, but also respectful. He ended by saying, “These are my boundaries for romantic partnership.” However, these messages created an absolute furor when the public learned of them, including a viral video of a licensed therapist explaining that Hill had “misused the concept of boundaries” and was trying to “control” Brady. 

“Jonah’s use of the term boundaries in this message is a misuse of the concept. A boundary is a healthy limit a person sets for themselves to protect their well-being and integrity. It is a rule or guideline that one creates to identify reasonable safe and permissible ways for others to behave towards them and how they’ll respond when someone passes those limits.

“However, in the message Jonah sent to Sarah, he is not setting boundaries that protect his emotional well-being. Instead, he is dictating what behaviors and friendships Sarah is permitted to have. He’s essentially instructing Sarah on who she can be friends with, what she can do professionally and how she can show up online.”

As I was learning about this event, a few observations jumped out. The first was that a licensed therapist had gone viral for lying about what a boundary actually is. Or rather, he used framing that was so disingenuous that it might as well be lying. 

A boundary isn’t a hard concept to understand. According to Psychology Today, “Setting boundaries means, first of all, knowing what one wants and expects from the people in their life, and what they’ll accept from them—and then clearly, concisely, and calmly stating those ground rules.”

Clearly, this description fits with Hill’s use of it. But even if we accepted the bogus redefinition of the TikTok therapist, Hill’s use of boundary was a limit on his own behavior meant to protect his emotional well-being. The behavior was continuing to act as a romantic partner with Sarah Brady, the emotional well-being was not feeling anxiety or insecurity due to her relationships with other men. However one might feel about that, it is entirely his right to make conditions for continuing to interact with someone, which is what a boundary is. 

My own experience with this term came to me via my history of therapy particularly when it came to alcoholism, first my own and, after becoming sober, that of others. Here are some examples that are suggested by the Family First Intervention for dealing with alcoholic loved ones: 

• No longer allowing them to live in your home
• No longer providing them money or other financial resources
• No longer letting them be alone with children
• No longer allowing them at family functions

And of course, these are always conditional on the alcoholic continuing their drinking. And alcoholics have famously opined that their families, in setting these boundaries, were trying to “control” them or not respecting their autonomy–exactly what the flouncy TikTok therapist claimed that Jonah Hill was doing to Brady. Hill was told that he was being “selfish” and needed to work on his own insecurities rather than trying to control Sarah’s behaviors. The larger implication behind this being that men needed to justify themselves when deciding whether or not they would continue to date a person, and in this justification a woman’s behaviors with other men were not recognized as valid.

The second, and more important, observation was the uncomfortable way in which the actions of the therapist echoed the actions of priests prior to the Reformation who insisted that only they were able to interpret scripture and often interpreted it in ways that served their self-interest. By any straightforward understanding of the term, Hill’s use was legitimate, but somewhere he had crossed the line, and now he was being refused the right to the legitimizing language of therapy. It seemed that there was a larger cultural argument happening about what kinds of demands (if any) men are allowed to put on women’s behavior, and that debate was being worked out through the language of psychology and being arbitrated by the authority of psychiatrists and therapists. 

The Growing Influence of Psychiatry

In the past three decades, there has been a radical shift in the way that people think about psychiatry and therapy. The stigma that once accompanied any discussion of mental health seems to have been largely eradicated and now a majority of Americans are largely accepting of both people who admit to receiving treatment getting treatment themselves. This general acceptance of psychiatric authorities is reflected all across culture, especially in the general proliferation of people in therapy, which has more than doubled in the past twenty years. Today, it is not unusual to hear that “therapy is for everyone,” that it is not for people with serious and specific problems, but some species of personal hygiene, a tool for growth even. And with this heightened acceptance, there seems to be an increased level of trust in and reliance on psychological concepts to do what morality used to do. 

Throughout America’s individualistic history and especially since the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, society has seen an enormous rise in what is called “value pluralism.” Rather than being restricted to following one narrowly circumscribed vision of social life, during the latter part of the 20th century, people were encouraged to pursue different lifestyles. And for a time, it was good. For the most part, people were still living on the fat (so to speak) of the previously stable moral concepts that they had inherited. However, over time, those concepts have degraded and there is no longer a sufficient language of morality that is able to arbitrate the different disputes that arise between various individuals and groups in modern society. The recognition of obligations and duties onto free individuals who ought to be bound by nothing other than their consent (which can be lifted at any time) has resulted in a situation where it is increasingly difficult to establish coherent social bonds. 

The legal system is still the primary device for resolving these concepts at the highest level, but at the ground level, there is actually very little for people to rely on in order to establish shared moral rules. This groundlessness can be seen everywhere, but one particularly poignant example is the rise of AITA (Am I the Asshole?) threads, in which people, bereft of any moral grounding simply cast their lot with public opinion and see if they will be vindicated by the crowd–hardly a logical basis for the establishment of moral legitimacy. 

Psychology, or at least the language of psychology, has attempted to fill this void of moral agreement by offering itself as a supposedly objective authority. But rather than making “moral” judgements, it presents its pronouncements as being about “health.” And with great regularity, these pronouncements are accepted almost entirely uncritically. 

It’s my perception, based on the media and my own personal interactions with people, that the general opinion that the public has towards the mental health fields (psychiatry and psychology) is that they are essentially objective sciences and that when their representatives give their pronouncements, those have something like the same weight as a physicist talking about the movement of atoms. Along with this, when these experts say that something is “unhealthy,” it is unhealthy in the same way that binge drinking or smoking a pack of cigarettes a day is unhealthy. 

This is very far from the truth. 

This isn’t to say that there aren’t aspects of the mental health sciences that are properly empirical. But these empirical aspects are typically embedded in a framework that come preloaded with a lot of value assumptions. Health is a global concept. What is or isn’t healthy cannot be understood without referring to other goals and values that psychology cannot supply with its empirical side alone, though this doesn’t prevent people from pretending that it does. 

Psychology has a long history of codifying societal values as if they were empirical facts. The examination of this subject has not been done as thoroughly anywhere as it has been in regard to its relationship to women and feminism. From “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) to The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) to the more recent Feminist Therapy Theory and Practice: A Contemporary Perspective, there is an enormous body of work dedicated to uncovering the ways that psychiatry has often been used to mask social prejudices and the impositions of power. Books like Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America and The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980, have explored in great depth the way that psychiatry was used as a tool for silencing women and controlling their behaviors by labeling them as mental defects or disorders.  As late as 1973, homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 

In Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, he traces the historical evolution of the perception of madness to show how psychiatry has always operated as a means of control by how it defines madness or disorder at any given time. Now, homosexuality has received the psychiatric stamp of approval, and as of 2019, the APA has been more concerned with treating men for the harmful effects of “traditional masculinity.” 

And it’s important not only to understand that psychology is used in this way, as was seen in the case of Jonah Hill and his girlfriend, but also that every time it is used in this way, it is illegitimately stepping beyond its authority.