Church has been on my mind a lot. Religion is a tricky topic to bring up publicly, but regardless of how you feel about it, it's true that having a shared community context every Sunday is something that's hard to find a replacement for. After all, priests were the OG therapists. And after each session you felt like you made some progress, or at least that you got your sins off your back for a bit.
Regardless, religion of old is more or less gone, and it's not coming back. If there's an alternative, I imagine it might become pretty popular. But the digital age is moving us further apart; http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html seems even more prescient after covid moved us away from offices too.
At church I learned how much I am loved and valued by God. The priests and the faithful at Mass demonstrated that love to me in many ways. In Catholic school, these lessons were reinforced and again, demonstrated by religious sisters in habits with their strict rules and adorable Irish brogues, as well as celibate priests and deacons who were faculty and staff in my high school. Every one of these Catholic men and women under vows always treated me with utmost respect and upheld my dignity, always and everywhere.
When the abuse scandal broke I couldn't quite understand it, but I realized later that I'd been subjected to decades of trauma in my childhood, only at home by family members--women. The abuse I suffered was just as real but it was ignored and denied while people went after the priests and sisters who had loved me and shown so much solicitude for me and my classmates.
I'm coming to terms with that now and I'm beginning to explore the root causes of my mental illness--which incidentally became severe when I lived in Silicon Valley and had a high-paying consultant career.
Thankfully I returned to my faith in Christ, rather than rejecting Him, and I receive daily reminders of my dignity, my self-worth, and how much we are loved. And that's worth more than any Silicon Valley career.
Beyond religion, we are much more individualist and busy mentally and emotionally. If it isn't one's immediate network being unavailable, odds are they themselves are. Neither of which is inherent to becoming more digital alone.
Like, do people even notice the advice we were given the last 2-3 decades? Of course we're more lonely collectively, it was practically a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Religion of old is gone in some bubbles and more than thriving in others.
When people are left to deal with these issues alone, the instinctual thing to do is to suppress it rather than confront and actually manage it. I think that distinction between motivations is what causes unhealthy coping mechanisms, like seeking drugs, to be the first pursuit of people suffering from these issues.
Finding someone to talk to encourages one to actually evaluate and understand what the issue is simply by trying to explain it to someone else. This can be done with anyone you trust. Although, as you say, it's certainly not as effective as someone with training and experience that can keep the expression going in the right direction, I'd posit it's much more effective than trying to do it alone because the approach just tends to be circumstantially different.
And personally, I have beef with the continuing commodification of what communities used to offer. Nothing against therapists (a man's gotta eat), but making transactions the first line of defense sits wrong with me.