Escape from Therapy

In her new book on Bad Therapy Abigail Shrier rips back the curtain on therapy practice. I would be remiss if I did not remark that I have been doing the same thing on my blog, Had Enough Therapy? for around sixteen years. I have also been fighting the good fight on my Substack.

Now, Shrier had a conversation with Nick Gillespie on the Reason site. In it she makes a number of salient and compelling points. They are worth your attention.

The first point is intended as a counterpoint to the current belief, presented by Jonathan Haidt,  that the problem with young people today is social media. To which Shrier remarks that young children, children under eight, have serious mental health issues, but do not have access to social media or smartphones. 

So in 2016, one in six kids between the ages of 2 and 8, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), already had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis. Those kids weren't on social media. They didn't have smartphones, certainly not in 2016. They don't have them today. So we know that this diagnosis has been exploding. And also mental health treatment has gone in one direction. So, nearly 40 percent of the rising generation has been to see a therapist already. And I'm not the only one to have noticed this—a team of researchers did a year ago and called this the treatment prevalence paradox. 

Shrier points out that, contrary to what happens with medical treatment, where treatment causes a reduction in illness, the prevalence of mental health treatment seems to correlate with an increase in mental illness. Is therapy the solution or the problem?

What they were noticing is that with treatment of illness, the more treatment there is, the more the point prevalence rate of a disorder should go down. We saw this with breast cancer treatment and other things. The incidence of death from breast cancer went down with more pervasive treatment. Here, there's been vast expansion of treatment and the rates of depression and anxiety have only gone up.

We have made the vagaries and emotional vicissitudes of life into mental illness. The point is well taken. Shrier might also have remarked that we have been in the business of producing armies of therapists, and as with other academic manias, the more therapists we produce the more we feel compelled to keep them working.

We're taking healthy kids who are a little bummed out, a little anxious, and we're loading them with intervention, as you say, much of it through school, through social-emotional learning and all the therapeutic techniques now going on in school. And so all these kids face is risk. 

If you thought that DEI was bad, take a look at the prevalence of counseling in today’s school systems.

And what I want people to know is that when a school counseling staff expands in your high school, it operates a lot like the [diversity, equity, and inclusion] staff of a university. It starts to take over everything. All of a sudden, the mental health staff is overseeing the entire curriculum. And that's what we're seeing.

The problem is, what's going on today in schools is effectively group therapy—they don't call it that—social-emotional learning where the kids sit around sharing their pain and sharing their trauma. You're very likely in that process to introduce incorrect memories or exaggerate kids' memories of a past pain.

What have we done? We have turned children into self-absorbed hypochondriacs.

We've created a generation of emotional hypochondriacs who are so focused on their emotional pain, so convinced of their trauma that it's debilitating them. And that's not to say that their pain isn't real. But as I learned when I talk to experts in hypochondriasis, the hyper-focus on real pain magnifies it. And I think that's what they're doing.

We have manipulated minds to turn everyone into trauma victims.

 Meaning, if an adult thought that what happened to him as a kid constituted trauma, he was more likely to suffer as an adult than a child who actually had suffered but didn't think of it as trauma. And here's the thing: Many of the adults who believed they had been traumatized as kids and so were suffering as adults, when they went back and looked, there was no record of actual trauma.

It turns out, if we come to believe we were traumatized as children and that the body keeps the score—that somehow, mysteriously, we have these memories stored outside our central nervous system, which has been disproven—we're a lot more likely to manifest symptoms than if we just think, "Yeah, I went through a hard time," and are able to surround ourselves with family, with friends, if we exercise, if we are active in the world, if we contribute to others. We tend to do really well in life with those things. In fact, the story of humanity is one of profound resilience in the face of what we think of as trauma.

I will mention, as I have done previously, that the notion of trauma being remembered, not in the mind, but in the body, dates to the Victorian era where it was called conversion hysteria.

Apparently, one cause of the problem was the wave of divorce and the number of children brought up in broken homes. Rather than stay married, we prefer to divorce and send the children off into therapy.

We had the high watermark of divorce in America when I was young, and people were put in therapy, or they felt like they needed therapy, because they went through something hard, like their parents splitting up. And as they entered adulthood, they entered therapy. They went into therapy and they thought it was beneficial. And they thought, my parents weren't there for me in various ways. I remember the pain I went through and also my therapist really encouraged me to see my parents' failings. 

Now Shrier tries to bring back the notion of parental authority. You know that the word authority has become a bad word, especially when it is associated with authoritarian government. And yet, what happens when parents concede authority over their children to an army of therapists.

One needs also to emphasize the role of Yale Law Professor, one Amy Chua, aka the Tiger Mother, who had no problem exercising authority over her daughters and who was wildly excoriated as a bad mother for doing so.

Right now, all disciplinary problems are treated as a mental health problem. And the kids get talk therapy and no discipline. That makes us put kids who are good kids really in danger of violence from other kids who really should be expelled. And we're seeing that. We're seeing kids brutalized in school. Since [former President Barack] Obama issued his "Dear Colleague" letter, they're not allowed to expel a disproportionate number of minority students. So instead of doing that, they do these therapeutic interventions. They don't work. We're seeing chaos in schools. We need to bring back order and shrink the mental health staff so that they can only treat the kids who actually need it, not everyone.

You may believe-- I dare you to try not to believe-- that liberal democracy is the greatest way to construct a government. But, do you believe that childrearing should be more democratic and less authoritarian. 

In many ways, that is what we have been doing. Funnily enough, this is what happened in China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. They empowered children and the children ran wild. Are you surprised that China, when it came time to choose between authoritarian capitalism and liberal democracy, opted for the former.

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