Abigail Shrier is an author and scholar. She hold degrees from Columbia and Oxford and attended Yale Law School. Her previous books, “Irreversible Damage: The Teransgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” (2020) remains an excellent, wildly popular book. In “Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up” she make the case there is nothing wrong with the kids, it’s the mental health “experts” causing most problems.
The overarching question Shrier asks is this: Why is the upcoming generation, known as Gen Z, suffering the worst mental health in world history? This question is especially troubling in light of the fact that Gen Z has received more therapy than any other generation in history. The plain sight correlation between these facts is too obvious to ignore any longer.
From the outset, Shrier questions the debilitating new age of child rearing. Parents today coddle their children, they make excuses, and they rush them to “professionals” to fix them. She asks:
“How did the first generation to raise kids without spanking produce the first generation to declare they never wanted kids of their own? How did kids raised so gently come to believe they had experienced debilitating childhood trauma? How did kids who received far more psychotherapy than any previous generation plunge into a bottomless well of despair?”
She continues:
“With the charisma of cult leaders, therapeutic experts convinced millions of parents’ to see their children as challenged. They infused parenting with self-consciousness and fevered insecurity. They conscripted teachers into a therapeutic order of education, which meant treating every child as emotionally damaged. They pushed pediatricians to ask kids as young as eight – who had presented with nothing more than a stomachache – whether they felt their parents’ might be better off without them. In the face of experts’ implacable self-assurance, schools were eager; pediatricians, willing; and parents, unresisting.
Maybe it’s time we offered a little resistance.”
“Healers Can Harm”
Shrier reminders readers that treatment can often harm. As she writes, “Psychotherapy needs a warning label” because it’s dangerous have become evident. Studies show therapy causes harm 20% of the time. Debriefing after an incident can make things worse. 40% of rising generation has received mental health treatment and 42% have a mental health diagnosis. Most importantly, there is no evidence psychotherapy works, so why expose yourself, and especially your children, if the risks are high and the rewards are low?
“Therapy,” she contends, “can hijack our normal processes of resilience, interrupting our psyche’s ability to heal itself, in its own way, at its own time.” In other words, maybe we just need to do less and let our natural processes work.
With other diseases, breast cancer for instance, more treatment and earlier detection has led to fewer deaths. With therapy, more treatment has led to higher rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide. Self-described experts tried to blame smartphones and other elements of modern life, but the mental health crises we face began before smartphones. More troubling, none of the “experts” have declared war on phones – not pediatricians or therapist or teachers or parents. We know smartphones are bad for kids. “We know the devices are addictive, sleep-depriving, and pathology-inducing” but curiously none of the experts want to get rid of them.
Shrier concludes that therapists have “failed to relieve the conditions they claim to treat” and “the methods and treatments mental health experts champion and dispense are already making younger people sicker, sadder, and more afraid to grow up.”
“Bad Therapy”
One of the many good questions asked by Shrier is this: “If a sadist wanted to induce anxiety, depression, a feeling of incapacity or family estrangement, what sort of methods would she employ? How would a malevolent mastermind induct a generation into a tyranny of feelings?” She concludes there are 10 things you can do to damage people’s mental health:
- Teach kids to pay attention to their feelings
- Induce ruminations
- Make “happiness” the goal
- Affirm and accommodate worries
- Over monitor
- Dispense diagnosis liberally
- Drug kids with medication
- Encourage kids to share their trauma
- Break contact with “toxic” family
- Create treatment dependency
The book elaborate on each of these, but notably there are a few necessary bits everyone should observe. For instance, teaching kids to pay attention to their feelings is insanely bad advice because feelings are often wrong.
In addition, Shrier believes medicating children is obviously troubling because “Altering your child’s brain chemistry is about as profound a decision as you’ll ever make as a parent. But for many child psychiatrists and far too many pediatricians, it involves little more than a pro forma signature and tearing off a sheet gummed to a prescription pad.” She continues with advice for all parents: “If you can relieve your child’s anxiety, depression, or hyperactivity without starting her on meds, it’s worth turning your life upside down to do so.”
What About the Schools
It’s not just therapists hired by well meaning, but unthoughtful parents. Schools have bought into the “mental health” game as well. In some states, children as young as 12 years old can received “counseling” at school without parental permission. These consolers are able to manipulate kids, even if accidentally. But, the consolers are not the only issue.
Group therapy sessions or “social emotional learning” is emphasized in some classrooms. Essentially, the students begin the day by complaining about their home life, and likely competing to see who has the worst circumstances.
The Greatest Generation didn’t complain individually about hardships, and they certainly didn’t corporately. Neither did kids growing up during the Civil War or kids who witnessed September 11. And kids in Kenya and everywhere else do not complain lack of housing and water. So, why do American kids think life is so horrible? Part of the answer it seems comes from misguided experts like trauma salesman Bessel van der Klok who wrote “The Body Keeps the Score” – a mega successful book.
Wide ranging experts have challenged the books’ findings. Based on the science, Shrier concludes, “The idea that we carry in our bodies the trauma of our younger selves – much less the trauma of our ancestors – may be a PR campaign in search of a product.” Elizabeth Loftus, an expert on memories, disagrees with Klok. Her findings suggest memories are not videos, but it’s a “constructive” process that can be altered. Children are especially susceptible to leading questions that change memories. “Interviewers can press people – children especially – to believe all sorts of things through leading questions. False memories can be just as vivid and apparently veridical as accurate ones.”
Other Tips
- Reflecting on her childhood, and she’s not much older than me, Shrier thinks it was just fine, but observes her generation thought it was pretty crummy, which is why they entered therapy in droves. And when it became time for her our generation to parent, “We assumed with perfect faith (and wholly without evidence) that gentler parenting could only produce thriving children. Shouldn’t flowers bloom in powdered sugar? Turns out, they grow best in dirt.”
- Be firm, discipline your children, and don’t be bullied by a child (or snowflake parents).
- In a chapter titled, “Spare the Rod, Drug the Child” she discourages medications. ADHD, for example, does not meet the definition of disorder and stimulants are more harmful than helpful. Similarly, anxiety and depression don’t necessarily need medication – in fact modest levels are healthy and part of development.
- “Maybe there is nothing wrong with our kids” and we are solving problems that might solve themselves.
- They are not weak unless we make them weak by teaching them they are bullied or stressed or cold. Most them are not bullied or dealing with stress, and kids certainly don’t need to be told to grab a jacket to play outside. Kids learn by being told “no” and failing.
- Give them children and young adults independence. Let them figure at least some things out.
Shier’s book is excellent and is highly recommended for all parents. As she concludes, remove “the technology, the hovering, the monitoring, the constant doubt. The diagnosing of ordinary behaviors as pathological. The psychiatric medications you aren’t convinced your child needs. The expert evaluations. Banish from their lives everyone with the tendency to treat your children as disordered. You don’t need them. You never needed them. And your kids are almost certainly better off without them. Having kids is the best, most worthy thing you could possibly do. Raise them well. You’re the only one who can.”
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