Is our therapeutic culture damaging children?
Search online for “are more teens today suffering emotional problems,” and a boatload of websites pop to your command. Explore a few of these sites, and you’ll find psychologists and counselors of all kinds writing about the mental and emotional stresses faced by 21st century teens; 32% of these young people, for example, have an anxiety disorder, and 1 in 5 experience depression.
One online paper from the American Psychological Association, “Anxiety among the kids is on the rise,” reports that therapists can grant children relief from anxiety through a program of cognitive behavior therapy and doses of Zoloft, an anti-anxiety medication. Here we also learn of various types of anxiety afflicting kids, like social anxiety disorder, separation anxiety disorder and panic disorder.
Experts at these sites cite as probable causes for these disorders everything from academic pressures to social media dependency, from diet to stress inflicted by today’s headlines. Unmentioned in these articles, however, is the possible damage being done to children by our therapeutic culture.
This is the subject of “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up” (Sentinel, 2024, 320 pages). Here investigative journalist Abigail Shrier takes a deep dive into the counseling and therapeutic practices as applied to adolescents. While readily acknowledging the benefits of psychiatry and pharmaceuticals for children struggling with severe mental health issues, Shrier found that our society’s widespread and decades-long application of therapies and medications to children in general has proven disastrous. “By feeding normal kids with normal problems into an unending pipeline,” Shrier writes of this reliance on therapy, “the mental health industry is minting patients faster than it can cure them.”
In her extensive investigations, Shrier spoke to a number of mental health experts who say the same thing, that the indiscriminate therapeutic treatments of adolescents do more harm than good. Iatrogenesis, a word new to me meaning the unintentional harm done during a medical intervention, is the title and subject of the first chapter of “Bad Therapy.” This idea recurs throughout the book as Shrier shows us that the problem is less often with the kids than those seeking to make them happier.
The labeling of a child, for instance, as ADD or as riddled with anxiety can have profound consequences. All too frequently, the child may come to identify with the label rather than bucking off the condition. Like a man who, having recognized that he’s an alcoholic, decides to continue drinking because he is what he is, so too a child may accept a categorization.
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In addition to conversations with therapists, teachers, and parents, “Bad Therapy” is a mix of statistics, case studies, and personal anecdotes. With all these come some surprises. Here’s just one example. In a Zoom conversation with Shrier, Michael Linden, a professor of psychiatry in Berlin, shoots down the idea that happiness in young or old should be the first order of business. “Sit in the bus and look at the people opposite from you. They don’t look happy. Happiness is not the emotion of the day.”
Shrier then writes, “Linden saw my surprise, so he asked me to consider how I was feeling right then, during our interview. I was inclined to say ‘good,’ but he jumped in. ‘You don’t feel happy at this moment. You are concentrating on the interview.’”
And as Shrier then notes, “He was right.”
“If you start your day by asking yourself whether you are happy,” Dr. Linden says, “the result can only be that you’re not happy. And then you think you need help to become happy. And you go to a psychotherapist and he’ll make you unhappy in the end.”
Is that always true? No. In my case, for instance, I do sometimes wake up happy. Sometimes I can make myself feel happy, usually by thinking of all I have to be grateful for. But that feeling, sweet as it is, always passes. Moreover, I’m a guy who has passed his threescore years and ten, so I’ve learned a few tricks along the way. I was a completely different creature at ages 12, 14 and 17, when pure happiness, if I recollect rightly, was as rare as a date on Saturday night.
The teachers who in schools operate as counselors but with no training or license, the mom and dad who inadvertently encourage errant behavior in their children through their “gentle-parenting” techniques, the books that play on the fears of parents with their inventories of emotional disorders: these are some of the broad categories which Shrier examines and exposes as being iatrogenic.
At the end of “Bad Therapy,” Shrier recommends ignoring “the diagnosing of ordinary behaviors as pathological. The psychiatric medication that you aren’t convinced your child needs. The expert evaluations. Banish from their lives everyone with the tendency to treat your children as disordered.”
A few pages earlier, Shrier writes, “This isn’t a mental health crisis. It’s closer to an emotion hypochondriasis and iatrogenesis crisis. It trucks not in neuroanatomy but a weakening of the soul — fear and disappointment and lack of capacity, the coiled horror of their own passivity. The unmissable verdict that they have failed to grow up.”
“Bad Therapy” is a red flag book, a warning about the dangers of good intentions and bad outcomes that should be read by parents, teachers, and therapists.
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
