Bad Therapy

If you are reasonably sentient and well-informed about psycho matters you know that young Americans are a mental health mess. They are suffering from an accumulation of anxiety and depressive symptoms. 

They do not get along with their peers or even with adults. As I noted yesterday and previously, they feel detached and alone, isolated and dissociated.

And if you have listened attentively to expert analysis, you would know that this problem had been caused by social media, by techno gadgets.

And yet, as I have been saying all these many years, it feels too easy to blame it on social media. Thus, I found myself especially impressed by the arguments put forth by Abigail Shrier in a summary of her new book, Bad Therapy.

According to Shrier, the kids are not alright because they have been therapied to within an inch of their sanity. They have been brought up in a therapy culture; they have lived their lives according to therapy; they have been coddled and swaddled by well-meaning professionals who care for their tender, traumatized psyches.

Also, they have learned bad habits. They have learned how not to get along with other children. They have learned how not to socialize and fraternize. 

Truth be told, I have been denouncing the therapy culture and its deleterious impact on child rearing for years now. I am certainly not alone. Now, Shrier has written a comprehensive guide to the impact of therapy on childrearing. 

I have not read her book, but I would point out that this specific phenomenon really began in the post-World War II era, in the time of the Baby Boomers. Then, you might not recall, a child-rearing manual, written by a Freudian pediatrician named Dr. Benjamin Spock, became a bible for young American mothers. 

The result was a psychologically ruined generation, the Boomer generation. I recommend the book about the boomers, by one Helen Andrews.

Anyway, Gen Zers, the group analyzed by Shrier, are the children of the Boomer generation. By the time Gen Z came along we were not just dealing with an influential book. We were dealing with a therapy industrial complex that had insinuated its way into all aspects of child rearing, from the nursery to the classroom to the playing field.

Millions of us bought in to this dogma, believing it would cultivate the happiest, most well-adjusted children. But instead, with unprecedented help from mental health experts, we have raised the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless and fearful generation on record.

How bad is it? What is the clinical outcome for the children who were brought up according to therapy culture principles:

This is a generation strikingly different from those prior to it, says Dr Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University. According to her, members of Generation Z – those born between 1995 and 2012 – are less likely to go on dates, get a driving licence, hold down a job or socialise with friends in person than millennials, born between 1980 and 1994, were at the same age.

We have often remarked on the simple fact that Gen Zers have no real work ethic. Therapy taught them to follow their bliss, and that does not include showing up for work on time:

Bosses and teachers confirm this analysis, reporting that members of Gen Z appear utterly underprepared to accomplish basic adult tasks – including showing up for work.

The truth is that these mental health interventions on behalf of our children have largely backfired. At best, they have failed to relieve the conditions they claim to treat. But far more likely is that they are making young people sicker, sadder and more afraid to grow up.

Obviously, Shrier pays some attention to outcomes. Studies suggest that the generation brought up by therapy culture principles is largely dysfunctional. And depressed:

I'm not the only one to have found something fishy in the fact that more treatment has not resulted in less depression. A group of academics led by Netherlands-based psychiatrist Johan Ormel noticed the same in a 2022 study.

The authors noted that treatment for major depression has become much more widely available (and, in their view, improved) since the 1980s worldwide. And yet in not a single Western country has this treatment made a dent in the prevalence of major depressive disorder. In fact, in many countries it actually increased.

The next time you read some heart-felt plaint about how mental health treatment is not sufficiently available, keep in mind that more therapy has effectively produced more distress.

For young people, the picture is bleaker still. Between 1990 and 2007 the number of mentally ill children rose 35-fold. And while overdiagnosis, or the expansion of definitions of mental illness, may partially account for this, it doesn't completely explain the pervasive distress felt by young people today.

If the purpose of therapy were to produce more business for therapists it would be a rousing success. Failing to treat or to cure, while creating a cultural ambiance where everyone believes that he must go to therapy is good for business. 

Therapy has cleverly told people that if treatment fails the fault lies with patients, not with therapists.

Of course, the standard therapy question, asking people how they feel, and encouraging them to introspect, is bad practice. It causes people to withdraw from their lives and to get lost in their minds.

Michael Linden, a professor of psychiatry at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, believes that routinely asking children how they are feeling is a terrible practice.

Moreover, Shrier correctly remarks, it is not always a good idea to talk about traumas. This despite the fact that trauma talk has become a national obsession:

And it's not always best to talk about your 'trauma' either.

'Really good trauma-informed work does not mean that you get people to talk about it,' mental health specialist Richard Byng tells me. 'Quite the opposite.'

One of the most significant failings of psychotherapy, he says, is its refusal to acknowledge that not everyone is helped by talking.

A dose of repression appears to be a fairly useful psychological tool for getting on with life for some – even for the significantly traumatised.

Rarely do we grant children that allowance. Instead, we demand that they locate any dark feelings and share them.

Dare we mention that when you make a fetish of dark feelings you are telling children that their dark feelings are their truth. Thereby you are depriving them of the chance to put such feelings and even the associated traumas behind them.

Moreover, busybody therapists have taught parents to invade children’s privacy, to subject them to constant surveillance.

Peter Gray, a professor of psychology at Boston College, Massachusetts. 'At home, the parents are watching them. At school, they're being observed by teachers. Out of school, they're in adult-directed activities. They have almost no privacy.'

Actually, Gray says, adding monitoring to a child's life is functionally equivalent to adding anxiety. 'When psychologists do research where they want to add an element of stress, how do they add it?' he asks. 'They simply add an observer.'

Therapy culture turns family life into a perverse, tragic melodrama. Shades of Freud. It teaches children to distrust their parents, to imagine that their parents do not want what is best for them.

Family estrangement strips the adult child of a major source of stability and support. Worse, it leaves those grandchildren with the impression they descend from terrible people. People so twisted and irredeemable that Mum and Dad won't let them in the house.

Generation Z has received more therapy than any other. In the US, nearly 40 per cent have received treatment from a mental health professional, compared with 26 per cent of Gen Xers – those born between 1965 and 1980.

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