Familial Support Is the Antidote to Bad Therapy
By Alexandra DeSanctis, Public Discourse.
Book Review: Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, Abigail Shrier.
Can more therapy lead to worse mental health? This is the central question that Abigail Shrier explores in her new book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, which argues that an increased focus on children’s mental well-being appears to have produced the opposite of its intended effect.
Early in the book, Shrier offers some sobering statistics:
The rising generation has received more therapy than any prior generation. Nearly 40 percent of the rising generation has received treatment from a mental health professional—compared with 26 percent of Gen Xers. Forty-two percent of the rising generation currently has a mental health diagnosis.
Much has been said about the ill effects of technology on mental health, particularly among children and adolescents. Yet Shrier takes a different approach, arguing somewhat counterintuitively that therapists themselves are exacerbating the very problem they’re supposedly here to solve.
Even as we’ve dedicated greater resources to the mental health of young people—most notably by increasing access to therapists both in and out of school—the overall well-being of Gen Z Americans seems to have declined by a number of important markers. “With unprecedented help from mental health experts,” Shrier writes, “we have raised the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless, and fearful generation on record. Why?”
The simplest version of Shrier’s answer might be found in this line: “Recasting personality variation as a chiaroscuro of dysfunction, the mental health experts trained kids to regard themselves as disordered.” In other words, parents’ fixation on their kids’ mental health has produced a set of perverse incentives, most notably because it has led to regular interaction with psychology professionals, and to overreliance on school officials who see mental health trouble lurking around every corner. It seems we have molded a generation of kids more inclined to experience psychological problems than if they had been left to their own devices more often than not.
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