Psychotherapy in pop song lyrics Running head: Psychotherapy in pop song lyrics ‘That boy needs therapy’: Constructions of psychotherapy in popular song lyrics Miltiades Hadjiosif1 and Adrian Coyle2 1Department of Health & Social Sciences, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK, and Scholar of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation 2Department of Psychology, Kingston University London, UK Corresponding author: Dr Miltiades Hadjiosif, Department of Health & Social Sciences, University of the West of England, Frenchay Campus, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK. Email:
[email protected] Miltiades Hadjiosif is a Chartered Counselling Psychologist and a Scholar of the Alexander S Onassis Public Benefit Foundation. He is Senior Lecturer in Counselling Psychology at the University of the West of England and sits on the Committee of the British Psychological Society's Community Psychology Section. His research focuses on discursive dimensions of psychotherapeutic constructs. Adrian Coyle is Professor of Social Psychology at Kingston University London. His areas of research expertise concern identity, psychology and religion, loss and bereavement, and qualitative research methods. With Evanthia Lyons, he was co-editor of Analysing Qualitative Data in Psychology (SAGE, 2016). Acknowledgements We would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Our heartfelt appreciation goes to our key informants for their time and enduring interest in our work. Special thanks to Giannis Papazachos for sound mixing an audio clip to play at conferences where we have presented a version of this paper. Word count: 6729 (excluding references and Appendix) 1 Psychotherapy in pop song lyrics ‘That boy needs therapy’: Constructions of psychotherapy in popular song lyrics Abstract Despite a plethora of academic and clinical descriptions of psychotherapy, less research attention has been focused on the ways in which psychotherapy is talked about and represented in popular culture.