Akademik

n.

The generation of people who grew up with, and are comfortable with, using therapy to solve personal problems.

Mr. Lorch began therapy at Columbia's campus counseling center. He estimates that he attended a dozen sessions before he was referred to an off-campus psychiatrist, whom he continued to see through the summer and into his sophomore year. In taking that step, Mr. Lorch joined some 2,600 other students who sought help at Columbia's counseling center last year and thousands more across the nation whose increasing use of psychotherapy is forcing campus mental health services to reevaluate their mission and expand.

— Leslie Berger, "The Therapy Generation," The New York Times, January 13, 2002

Jackson Pollock is in; Lee Krasner isn't. Frank Stella, Clyfford Still, De Kooning, yes: Motherwell, Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, no. 1930s modernists Charles Sheeler and Stuart Davis, yes: 1930s regionalists Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, no. Koons, yes, ditto his contemporary Mike Kelley (snogging teddies — pop remade for the therapy generation).

— Rode Jennings, "American as plaster meat," New Statesman & Society, September 24, 1993

Here's a slightly earlier citation that uses the expanded phrase rehab-and-therapy generation:

Today's lesson? The only good sacred cow is a dead sacred cow. That about sums it up for manic prankster Denis Leary, a corrosively irreverent, chain-smoking wise guy who has carved out a niche of cult fame with his distinctive MTV promo spots. ... And he finds the new age excesesses of the rehab-and-therapy generation particularly galling.

— Mike Duffy, "Leary's 'No Cure for Cancer' Debuts on Showtime," Tulsa World, February 20, 1993