IT strikes me that therapy is a bit like McDonalds. Here's how the argument runs.

Thirty years ago, the first McDonald's branch opened in Britain. Since then, these American fast-food restaurants have sprung up all over the place, contributing to the nation's broader waistbands and helping to make all high streets look the same.

This is not a broadside against McDonald's as such, whose food doesn't appeal to me, although we occasionally took the children when they were younger. No, what interests me is the parallel between the fast-food chain and another sort of American import.

McDonald's in Britain is having a bit of a mid-life crisis as the company hits 30, with falling profits as people begin to turn away from its food.

The plight has been crystallised by the recent documentary film Super Size Me, in which the American film-maker Morgan Spurlock lived off McDonald's meals for a month, always choosing the Super Size option where available. A perverse sort of diet, but Spurlock's idea was brilliantly simple, filming his own sharp decline in health due to all the fast-food meals.

McDonald's responded by doing away with the Super Size jumbo portions, introducing more salads and giving away pedometers, which were intended to encourage guzzlers of cheeseburgers to take a little exercise.

After 30 years, McDonald's restaurants are as familiar as older British retail institutions such as, say, Marks & Spencer. Now we have another American import to get used to: therapy.

According to a report released on Monday by the Future Foundation, our stiff upper lips are quivering as once-reserved Brits pour out their emotions in therapy sessions.

It is a myth that Britons are afraid of therapy, says the report. No longer suppressed and uptight, we are happy to confess all to a stranger, often spending thousands of pounds in the process.

In trying to work out what I think about this, I shall start with a few negative concerns. If more than eight in ten people think therapy is acceptable in certain circumstances, doesn't that imply we are turning into a nation of self-obsessed worriers?

If so, and to stay in the negative groove for a moment, there is surely a danger that we have imported the American trend towards the Super Size Ego. In burger terms, this is the Jumbo Me, in which everything about the self can be magnified, prodded and paraded, endlessly examined and fretted over.

Confessional television, another import from the US, is said to partly explain our love for therapy. Where once confession was a private religious ritual for Catholics, now it has become entertainment, with people willingly going on television to parade their sinful eccentricities.

Stress is to blame also and that's a worry because stress can be a real problem. If one person's stress is likely to have a specific cause, more general anxiety is said to do harm too, especially among those who subscribe to the myth of decline and convince themselves that life is getting steadily worse.

Anyone suffering from such anxieties is now more likely to speak to a therapist about their difficulties. This worries me in many ways, not least because it seems we are too willing to get everyday problems out of proportion. People have always had corrosive doubts about themselves, who they are, what they do - it's part of being human.

That said, some therapy is clearly helpful and should not be disparaged. Even a Mafia boss feels the need the unburden himself in TV's The Sopranos.

To date, my own preferred therapy comes in assorted dull and happy shapes: family, friends, making bread, reading, listening to music, playing the guitar, running and the occasional bottle-shaped therapy session at the weekend.

Perhaps one day all that won't be enough. So I can't be entirely down on therapy, but all this rampant self-obsession still alarms me. Let's hope that 30 years down the line, we aren't starting to worry about what we are doing to our minds - and our wallets.

Updated: 10:43 Thursday, October 14, 2004