Abigail Shrier’s ‘Bad Therapy’ Blames Therapy Culture for Gen Z’s Mental Health Crisis

My son’s school guidance counselor sent out an email this week saying she will be having “check in” lunches with small groups of students several times over the next two months. My son is in kindergarten and has shown no signs of mental distress. Should I opt him out?After reading Abigail Shrier’s new book, “Bad Therapy: Why Kids Aren’t Growing Up,” I’m seriously considering it.The rising generation — Gen Z and younger— have been exposed to more therapy and mental health interventions than any in history, and yet they exhibit the most mental distress. More than 40 percent have a mental health diagnosis. Nearly 10 percent have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and another 10 percent with ADHD. They wear their diagnoses like badges of honor on social media, proudly displaying them in their bios.Generation Z doesn’t hang out with friends in person as much as prior generations. They aren’t dying to get a driver’s license when they turn 16. They’re not having sex. They don’t want to take risks, rise to challenges, or grow up. “They are arguably the most fearful generation on record,” Ms. Shrier writes. Could all this therapy, social emotional learning in schools, and navel gazing be causing harm?A former Wall Street Journal columnist and mother of three, Ms. Shrier argues in “Bad Therapy” that the youth mental health crisis is not caused by smartphones, climate change, or the Covid pandemic, but rather by a cultural obsession with therapy, with validating and accommodating children’s feelings, over-diagnosing and medicating them, and not preparing them to cope with disappointment, discomfort, or hardship — skills essential to functioning adults.Parents today, mainly from Generation X, Ms. Shrier argues, are so focused on their children’s happiness that they have abdicated their authority to “experts”: therapists, guidance counselors, teachers, and parenting books. Hence the rise in popularity of “gentle parenting” and other philosophies that prioritize a child’s emotions and “talking things out” instead of setting boundaries or punishing. Nearly 40 percent of this rising generation has gotten some mental health treatment, compared to only 26 percent of Gen X.Therapy, though, can produce effects that are iatrogenic, which is a dollar and 25 cent word for harmful. This is the crux of Ms. Shrier’s thesis: By teaching a child to focus on his feelings and to unearth “trauma” and ruminate on it, schools and therapists are not in fact teaching children “resiliency.” They are instead teaching a child that a negative emotion is problematic, that they might need help, or even a diagnosis.“Rumination is the major predictor of depression,” Ms. Shrier writes. “Of our sixty-thousand wakeful seconds each day, only a tiny percentage are in a state we would call ‘happy.’ … Regularly prompting someone to reflect on their current state will — if they are being honest — elicit a raft of negative responses.” “This isn’t a mental health crisis. It’s closer to an emotional hypochondriasis and iatrogenesis crisis,” Ms. Shrier writes. Ms. Shrier spends a chapter detailing how this therapy and trauma-centered mindset has infiltrated schools through “social-emotional learning,” psychological assessments, and guidance counselor visits, particularly without parental consent. She notes that teachers are most often the ones who refer a child for ADHD or psychological testing. They are the ones, Ms. Shrier writes cynically, who benefit from a medicated child.Ms. Shrier poured through studies and interviewed psychiatric researchers, parents, and teens. Where the book is lacking is in its focus on upper- and middle-class families. There is a small section on the failures of “restorative justice” programs in schools. Perhaps this oversight is because the therapy mindset is most prevalent in those with resources and relative comfort. The example she uses for a parent who successfully kept his attention-deficit-disordered child off medications is a psychiatric researcher. If anyone could do that, it would be him. Ms. Shrier warns that this book is not advice for parents of children with serious mental illness. It is instead about “the worriers; the fearful; the lonely, lost, and sad. College coeds who can’t apply for a job without three or ten calls to Mom.” She debunks Gen X and Millennial parenting orthodoxy that validating children’s feelings is the secret to raising successful young adults.“Maybe we were overcompensating for the fact that our own parents had assumed the opposite: that psychologists were the last people you should consult on how to raise normal kids,” Ms. Shrier writes.I can relate. My mother often told me and my sisters to “sleep it off.” She dispensed gems like, “If you say you’re happy, you’re happy.” I jumped at getting my driver’s license, going to college, and taking risks.After I finished “Bad Therapy,” I told my husband we need to stop accommodating my 6-year-old’s picky eating habits so much and insist he sit at the table through dinner. I’m still — perhaps overly — concerned about his happiness, but some disappointment and discomfort will doubtless do him good. “If they find themselves facing disappointment or rejection for the first time as adults, something has gone terribly wrong,” Ms. Shrier writes.

Abigail Shrier’s ‘Bad Therapy’ Blames Therapy Culture for Gen Z’s Mental Health Crisis

Abigail Shrier’s ‘Bad Therapy’ Blames Therapy Culture for Gen Z’s Mental Health Crisis

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