Basic Trope: No therapists are available who are allowed to know about the secret life of a suffering character.
- Straight: Alice, a resident of Tropeville, secretly fights aliens in her spare time and this has lead to some traumatic experiences she’d really like to talk through with a therapist, but she can’t because there are no therapists who know that aliens are real and in Tropeville.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob is a vampire who is struggling to overcome his thirst for blood so he goes to an addiction counselor and calmly explains his problem… and she decides he’s delusional and has him committed to a mental hospital.
- There Are No Therapists
- Alice's therapist is constantly caught in the middle of the chaos of Alice's lifestyle and he still quite pointedly refuses to believe that Alice is anything other than a delusional madwoman, ironically having other people (who are more willing to accept the hard evidence, doubly so if they were injured by it) to think he's nuts.
- Downplayed: Charlie is a superhero with a secret identity which he does not want to reveal to his anger-management counselor so he creatively edits their conversations with mixed results.
- Justified:
- In a bid to deny our heroes the mental health care they need, the evil aliens always kill any therapist who might believe in them.
- The Magic Comes Back and supernatural threats and individuals are on the Earth for only a few years. Masquerade is strong because there is little evidence of it and the stakes of having advantage in Sufficiently Analyzed Magic is too high for any organization to pass on.
- Inverted:
- Diane, a Muggle who has seen vampires are real but doesn't believe it herself, goes to a psychiatrist for help with her 'delusions', but her psychiatrist turns out to be a vampire who now has to choose whether to convince Diane she's actually sane or uphold The Masquerade.
- All therapists are supers — which kinda sounds cool until you have to see one for a mundane psychiatric issue and they cannot help because it's not caused by a "super" reason (so if you say that no, your coulurophobia isn't because Pennywise's cousin is out to get you, or you survived the killer space klown invasion of '88, or one of The Joker's rampages... so, uh, want a refill on that Clonazepam?)
- Subverted:
- Alice decides she simply must see a therapist so goes to George who despite knowing nothing about aliens previously, accepts her stories as true and helps her deal with her traumatic experiences.
- Turns out Alice is delusional.
- Those in charge of The Masquerade learn that therapists are bound by even muggle law to not divulge any information about their clients, so they make an exception and back up Alice's claims.
- Double Subverted:
- … but now George Knows Too Much and a top secret government organization (which may or may not be related to the standard protectors of the masquerade but are decidedly more ruthless) decides he must be Killed to Uphold the Masquerade.
- Being delusional and having a literally magical life are not mutually exclusive (as a matter of fact, in some cases one may be the natural result of having the other), but the therapist refuses to stretch their belief that extra inch.
- Unfortunately, this trope manifests in a different way when the therapists Alice goes to become insane from the information Alice reveals because wizards in this setting have the innate ability to resist said information being told to them and Alice (and the people who protect the Masquerade) did not know that. And of course no wizard wishes to become a therapist, so Alice is back to step one.
- Parodied: The Muggle therapists of Tropeville have been seeing quite a lot of patients lately with unbelievable stories - so much so that Tropeville General Hospital's psych ward is the place to go for factual information about aliens, superheros, vampires, and wizards.
- Zig Zagged: Bob, a vampire desperate for help overcoming his addiction to blood, makes an appointment with addiction counselor Fran and tries to explain. Fran sits there with a strange expression causing Bob to think she’s about to pick up the phone to call the Bedlam House. But instead, she reveals she is a werewolf and therefore in on the secret. Bob feels silly for his assumption and therapy happens. Only when it’s time to leave, Fran stops him, violently. “You didn’t know about me and you were prepared to break The Masquerade. Now you must die.” she says, brandishing a stake.
- Averted:
- Charlie is a superhero working for a top secret organization, but his superiors know how stressful it can be living a double life and fighting crime so they watch carefully for warning signs and make sure to send Charlie for mandated therapy with their agency psychiatrist.
- Erica is a trained therapist who becomes a Secret-Keeper for her alien-fighting friend Alice. Alice spreads word to her fellow heroes fighting against all sorts of threats (not just invading aliens) about Erica being in beneath The Masquerade, and her practice sees an uptick in business.
- Enforced: For many seasons, Super Secret Alien Hunters of Tropeville was a show where There Are No Therapists and had a lot of entertaining drama because of it, but with the cast of characters going increasingly mad, the writers started to worry about the message this might be sending to viewers, so now characters will periodically say how much they'd love to be in therapy for their issues but can't because there are no therapists who know about aliens.
- Lampshaded: Henry, a wizard, is trapped in a downward spiral of depression and his girlfriend begs him to get some help, but he explains he can’t because it would not be possible to explain his problems to a therapist without magic coming up. His girlfriend nods sadly and finishes his thought, “… because all therapists are Muggles.”
- Invoked: The Big Bad is besotted with the hero’s sidekick but she would never join The Dark Side as she is now, so he arranges things so that she’ll be put through the ringer and then he turns back time for everyone except them so that no therapist will believe her when she tells them everything that happened to her and without psychiatric help, the sidekick will grow Darker and Edgier and the Big Bad might just have a chance with her.
- Exploited: Edward, a demon-hunter, needs to infiltrate a mental ward to catch a demon in-patient there, so he goes to a therapist and tells the complete truth about everything that has happened to him so that the therapist will have him committed to the mental ward where the demon is.
- Defied:
- The Gadgeteer Genius of Super Secret Alien Hunters of Tropeville sees that her teammates increasingly need psychiatric help but can’t risk telling a therapist about it, so she builds an Artificial Intelligence capable of performing talk therapy.
- Charlie is a Secret-Keeper who sees the trauma his friends and family are going through, so he studies for a degree in therapy so they can have someone in the know to lend an ear to.
- When Henry's therapist doubts that he's a wizard, Henry performs magic in front of him to prove it, then invokes doctor-patient confidentiality to keep him from breaking The Masquerade.
- Discussed: Wizards General Hospital is planning to close its mental ward and refer all wizards to muggle therapists, but the wizard therapists employed there argue that wizards would not get proper care if all therapists were muggles because they would have to edit their story and this would harm the therapy process.
- Conversed: George, an ordinary therapist, is watching a show about alien abductions and tells Alice that he thinks therapists are too quick to assume that a person is crazy and if someone came to him about alien-related trauma, he would try to be open-minded of the possibility that aliens really do exist and these things really do happen.
- Deconstructed: When the only possible result of meeting someone to try to deal with the horrors that affect your mind is to be declared insane, then the only viable road is to not meet them at all. Needless to say, heroes will be driven insane sooner rather than later.
- Reconstructed:
- The therapist is a Muggle, and because of this has an external (and probably even impartial) view of the weirdness that is going on. Because of this, he doesn't approach the mental instabilities of a wizard as "sure-fire signs of being Drunk on the Dark Side" but as mental instabilities, that can be discussed, diagnosed, treated and cured with the care and compassion that the rest of the wizard community refuses to give the affected man (which would surely drive him to the aforementioned Dark Side, because "Then Let Me Be Evil").
- Heroes visit therapists and cloak their otherworldly traumas with mundane language; a recurring alien enemy becomes an abusive stalker, the death of their friend in battle is changed to mourning a dead sister, etc.
- While Alice's therapist does secretly think she's insane, he entertains her stories and flowery language, tries to help her through her issues and doesn't report her unless she poses a threat to herself or someone.
- Implied: Several Muggles see therapists, showing that competent therapists exist in the setting, but Alice does not.
- Played For Laughs: When Alice sees a therapist, she has to use elaborate metaphors for her alien-hunting life, amusingly intercut with scenes from her real life.
- Played For Drama: Alice insists that therapists won't work for the problems she is suffering and only decides to see one when her boyfriend begs her to do it — and he comes to regret it when the therapist comes out of the office twenty minutes later, tells him that Alice is suffering a severe paranoid delusion, and he's already called for reinforcements to take her away to the local madhouse and "thanks" him for his "help" keeping such a "dangerous madwoman" off the streets.
- Played For Horror: Alice goes to see a therapist. By the end of the day, she's been incarcerated and given a lobotomy.
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