The Therapy Industrial Complex

Imagine that a child possesses over four trillion XY chromosomes. Imagine that that child is induced to believe that he is a girl. Let us add that he really, really believes that he is a girl. 

Does this make him a girl? Not for an instant. 

It’s like saying that the man who considers that his left leg is longer than his right leg and that it must be amputated, above the knee, lest he jump off the roof of the nearest skyscraper, is really anything other than delusional. Psychiatrists label him as suffering from body dysphoria.

Transgenderism is simply another delusional belief. One ought not to cave to the ambient madness and declare that some people really are trans. If by that you mean that they are really delusional, so be it. If you mean that they are really who they think they are, you are supporting their delusion.

Among the laity such beliefs are commonplace. They are still grossly wrong. The problem arises, Abigail Shrier discovered, when therapists buy the delusional belief, or else when they sell it. 

When faced with children in distress these so-called healing professionals accept delusional beliefs as real. If the child or his parents suspect that he is really a she, or vice versa, the therapist will be buying the delusion. If the patient does not suspect such a thing,the therapist will set out to sell the delusion-- and to pretend that it is science. 

In the case of Chloe Cole, her consultation with a credentialed therapist produced a series of primitive horrors. 

Shrier explains:

For Chloe, that pipeline meant puberty blockers at age 12 followed by cross-sex hormones. A medically unnecessary 

double mastectomy at age 15. By 16, she was filled with regret.

It’s easy to see this as one more ghastly entry in the macabre chronicles of gender medicine: incompetent therapists and unethical doctors deconstructing young girls’ bodies for reasons that seem alternately depraved, mendacious and confused.

And, dare we add, misogynistic.

Now that Shrier has identified a major culprit in the current wave of transmania, she starts asking whether this madness tells us something about the practice of therapy today.

 

Shrier continues:

Not merely of therapists’ “affirming” teens’ transgender identity, specifically. But one more instance in which the Bad Feelings experts made adolescents’ bad feelings worse.

As it happened, Chloe Cole had been undergoing various forms of therapy for years:

Like a lot of teen girls who suddenly adopt a transgender identity, Cole’s mental health treatment preceded her gender confusion. She had been medicated for ADHD starting at age nine or ten—given escalating levels of stimulants that made her feel lousy and disconnected from her body and didn’t seem to help. She now believes ADHD was a misdiagnosis.

“In general, this model of making everything a condition—if a child is different in any way, if they’re not focusing in school, if they’re a little bouncy in class and they won’t sit in their seat—it takes the responsibility off of the adults to say, ‘Okay, let’s just medicate them. That’ll fix the problem,’” Cole told me.

As you know, Shrier is a journalist. So she investigated the extent to which American children were being therapied. The result were alarming, to say the least:

In the course of my research, I became aware of three things: First, that unprecedented numbers of American kids were undergoing therapy or on psychiatric medication. Second, that therapists’ diagnoses were often altering adolescents’ self-understanding. And, third, that large numbers of parents had become profoundly dependent on therapists to guide their parenting and “fix” their kids.

One recalls, wistfully, the arrival, more than a decade ago, of Amy Chua, aka the Tiger Mom. When Chua shared her decidedly Asian and countertherapeutic ways of bringing up her daughters, when she defied the conventional wisdom of developmental psychologists and even Dr. Benjamin Spock, Wall Street Journal readers filled the comments sections with the most dire prophecies about the terrible things that would happen to her children. Obviously, none of it came true.

In any event, the psycho profession has bought into the delusion of transgenderism. 

It wasn’t only ideologically-motivated “gender therapists” who were making mischief, reifying the idea in adolescents’ minds that they were really, truly transgender. Ordinary, well-meaning therapists were doing the same, not primarily for ideological reasons. Sometimes the therapists were simply following the guidance of their accrediting organizations. But just as often, affirming the adolescent – in place of treating her – was simply par for the course. That was simply what the therapeutic relationship with the teen patient had become.

As you know, I have often had occasion to bemoan the mental state of today's Gen Z. Shrier offers one explanation-- among others-- for why this generation seems to be in trouble:

The rising generation is swimming in therapy. Forty two percent of Gen Z—those born between 1995 and 2012—has been in therapy (more than any other generation). Forty two percent has a mental health diagnosis. One recent survey indicates the extent of diagnosis may even be more dramatic: 60 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 26 may have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

No one finds this surprising. Everyone seems to believe-- it’s the conventional wisdom-- that the fault lies with social media and telephonic gadgets. And yet, as Shrier points out, the statistics lead us to question this causal relationship:

Perhaps most alarming, by 2016—long before the Covid lockdowns and well before American kids aged 2 to 8 were even on social media—almost 20% of these little ones had a diagnosed mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder.

They are receiving unprecedented levels of mental health treatment. Curiously, they also seem to be getting worse.

You will feel even more distress when you discover that it is not just therapists who impart this dysfunction. Schoolteachers and counselors have become adjunct therapists, to the detriment not only of education, but of mental health:

For well over a decade, teachers and school counselors have assumed the mandate (and curricula, and use of instructional time) to play shrink indiscriminately with kids, often styled as “Social Emotional Learning.” Parents stopped trusting their own judgment and family traditions regarding childrearing, instead relying on shrinks to guide their parenting. And we all allowed our kids’ (largely normal) bad feelings to be pathologized by the those in the bad-feelings business.

Obviously, making the problems and torments of everyday life therapy-worthy has its consequences. If Gen Zers were not sufficiently dysfunctional to begin with, the cultural influence of therapy will make it nearly impossible for them to learn how to function socially:

For the rising generation, the language of psychopathology provides the lens with which they understand themselves and each other. Where my generation would “self-diagnose” with laziness or procrastination, the rising generation might see complex post-traumatic stress disorder or ADHD.

But while laziness can be obliterated by a change of attitude and habits, a mental health diagnosis demands treatment or accommodation. Trying to lift yourself out seems futile. And so, unsurprisingly, the generation lavishly labeled with mental health diagnoses also has the least faith in its ability to meet even routine challenges or turn their lives around.

Congratulations in advance to Abigail Shrier, for her new book, Bad Therapy, to be published in late February. 

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or (preferably) for a fee.