Abigail Shrier doesn’t write like a lawyer. Her prose is lively and she’s funny enough to make you laugh out loud at times. However, her legal training, including a J.D. from Yale Law School, is again on display in this magazine. bad therapy, a widespread critique of American childhood treatment. That is not to say that legal analysis plays a significant role in the book, but rather that Schrier is disciplined enough to focus only on narrow but easily defensible claims on highly provocative topics. This means that they have mastered the techniques to maintain this.
Schuur is not entirely condemning the practice of therapy. On the contrary, she believes that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a real solution for individuals suffering from real, clinical mental health issues. Schrier also does not address the question of who or what is ultimately responsible for the youth mental health crisis. However, if you read her analysis more closely, you’ll see that she has a compelling answer.
Rather, Schrier is urging Americans to reconsider whether allowing a version of talk therapy to penetrate the broader culture could be counterproductive or even dangerous. Evidence is mounting that something is wrong. Anxiety and suicide among youth continue to skyrocket, with the latter increasing by 150 percent between 2009 and 2019, according to Schur’s research. in front new coronavirus pandemic. These concerns border on mental health, even though parents (who spend more than twice as much time with their children as they did 50 years ago) and professionals are monitoring child well-being at unprecedented levels. Just two of the many other crises.
What explains this inverse correlation? Shrier raises two related criticisms. First, our children suffer from too much therapy in non-traditional settings: at school, at home, on social media, and even in their surrounding culture. Untrained teachers, parents, and influencers mimic real therapy by having children ruminate about their feelings, relationships, and frustrations. Second, of course, drama therapists are bad at their jobs. They can interfere with healthy parent-child relationships. They encourage children to weaponize their “trauma” against friends who may be accused of insufficient sensitivity, often turning children into bullies. And at worst, it inadvertently instills suicidal thoughts in non-depressed children, the most dramatic of several potential iatrogenic (i.e., practitioner-induced) harms. It’s just a thing.
Schuur relies primarily on dissident parents, psychologists, and psychiatrists who blew the whistle on the metastasis of toxic therapy. They warn, among other things, that school-based programs with sweet-sounding names promote a set of unproven principles that can hinder students’ adjustment to the real world. His two programs, social-emotional learning and “restorative justice,” are nothing more than “therapeutic approaches” that reframe “all bad behavior as a cry for help.” Under this banner, teachers (and the “paraprofessionals” hired to monitor troubled children) see themselves not as agents but as objects controlled by a diagnosed condition. practices unlicensed therapy on all students. And now every behavioral problem has been diagnosed. Students are no longer forced to overcome academic, social, or behavioral challenges because the adult in the room solves the problem for them.
The same pattern holds outside of school, where the trial-and-error process of growing up is sterilized and overseen in the name of “gentle parenting” and similar endeavors – in the words of psychologist Adam Mastroianni. wording– It reaches children’s brains through their ears. Past generations have worked through childhood hardships. Now let us discuss them. In our therapeutic culture, it is considered better to use words rather than allow children to take risks, learn lessons, experience life’s ups and downs, and grow.
However, constantly encouraging children to talk about their feelings can be counterproductive in many ways.Yulia Chentsova-Dutton, a psychologist at Georgetown University’s Institute of Culture and Emotions I’ve come to a conclusion “Attention to certain emotions, or focusing on emotions, can increase psychological distress.” Elizabeth Loftus, a prominent psychologist, teaches young people to see themselves as survivors of trauma. When encouraged to think, they report being less resilient, if not more so. It turns out that ruminating on what’s bothering you is the best way to come to believe that your life is defined by that challenge. Treatment is not available to everyone. Of course, this cannot be done anytime and anywhere.
Therefore, the important question that Schrier’s book implicitly raises is, “Why would anyone think that?” Therapy is an intervention, a response to restore the normal flow of human life when things go off track. It is not designed to be the standard or default for young people’s lives.
It is certainly true that one of the reasons that treatments have become so widespread is because many Westerners do not believe that treatments come with trade-offs. This idea of treating medical interventions as unmitigated goods is certainly gaining ground. The coronavirus pandemic has caused some of us to try to convince ourselves and others that all interventions, such as school closures and mask-wearing mandates, are worthwhile in the face of some notable threat. It revealed how many people there are. Similarly, many people seem to deny that talk therapy can have any downsides.
Perhaps that’s because the counterproductive elements of therapy suggest that something is very wrong with Western culture. Therapy can be harmful if it encourages what psychologists call “state orientation,” meaning action orientation and a focus on how you are rather than what you can do. If so, perhaps our culture is expressive individualismThe idea that the goal of life is to accept and celebrate who we are is toxic in itself. If focusing on ourselves rather than serving others actually makes us miserable, perhaps loosening the traditional unchosen bonds of marriage and parenthood can free us. Instead, we may be enslaving ourselves to rumination.
It’s hard to argue with Schrier’s clear conclusions, but they remain controversial, albeit in small numbers. Raising resilient children requires letting them be kids, removing them from distractions, and allowing them to experience non-fatal failures. When we talk about emotions, it’s important to talk about channeling them into empowerment, action, and service to others. In other words, take CBT to detox from mass-produced talk therapy. But the brilliance of this book, and indeed Schrier’s genius in attacking this subject, lies in its implicit conclusion, which takes the form of social criticism rather than whistleblowing. . What is the real panacea for our therapeutic culture? The traditional core of action-oriented and other orientations has always been about the demands of the times and the subordination of oneself to the needs of others. To do. Three things come to mind: religion, work, and the nuclear family.They are anti-therapeutic, but as sufficient evidence testify, has a strong correlation with happiness. Ms. Shrier is too disciplined to say so outright, but fundamentally her complaint is with a progressive social culture that is making us, especially young people, sick.
