This rapid expansion of therapeutic social services triggered a conservative backlash in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, along with efforts to cut their growth. Yet by then therapeutic responses to life problems were demanded by millions of ordinary people, who were now less comfortable turning to pastors, parents, companies, or other traditional sources of authority. The therapeutic state metastasized across a wide number of institutions, including a large nonprofit sector that by the 1990s had become the delivery vehicle for state-funded social services.
