These days, keeping your feelings to yourself is considered unhealthy. Authors Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel think it’s time to reconsider. With their new book “One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance” (St. Martin’s Press, $23.95), they take a critical look at the American obsession with letting it all out – and how it might be hurting, rather than helping, us. Together Ms. Hoff Sommers, who writes books on American culture, and Ms. Satel, a practicing psychiatrist, reexamine and criticize commonly held notions of mental health. In an interview with The New York Sun’s Pia Catton, they elaborated on their argument.

Q: You’ve coined a new term – “therapism” – to describe what you’re seeing in our culture. What is therapism?

Christina Hoff Sommers: Therapism is a philosophy, a way of life, that views humans as centers of fragility. It believes that vast segments of the population under duress are in need of experts – such as self-esteem educators, traumatologists, crisis counselors – to take them through the vicissitudes of everyday life. We view it as a philosophy that challenges a traditional American creed: the can-do attitude of stoicism and self-reliance.

If this book were about New York, it could be called “One City Under Therapy.” Practically everybody here does it at some point. What are you saying to people in therapy?

CHS: This is not a book against people who have problems and are seeking help. What we object to is imposing the therapeutic mentality on others; treating the human condition as a pathology that is in need of cure. What we’re arguing is that we should at least have a debate about whether or not we want to go in this direction.

You’re both highly critical of the trauma industry, and Ms. Satel has gone inside the industry, attending a training session from the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, which certifies crisis counselors. What is going on there?

Sally Satel: The essence of their intervention is the pseudo group therapy called “debriefing,” which is what we were trained to do. As the counselor, you sit with a group of 10 or 20 people who, say, witnessed a shooting at a place of employment. You sit with the employees and have them emote. The phrase is “to verbalize their trauma.”

Now, you can react to that as being intrusive or annoying. But in addition, it can make some people worse. It interferes with the usual instinct, which is to distance yourself. It also introduces a very large dose of suggestion: “You can’t sleep? That could be a precursor of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

People start to perceive themselves as being overwhelmed. It’s not a healthy preparation for coping. It puts someone in the mind-set of “I’m overwhelmed. I’ve been defeated by this.”

Why are crisis counselors so sought-after?

SS: One of the assumptions is that without their intervention, post-traumatic stress disorder (which is a legitimate psychiatric diagnosis) will develop. That’s how they sell themselves to businesses – the fear of liability.

In the book, you praise Rudy Giuliani, writing: “On September 11, he spoke to New Yorkers as mature adults, giving practical advice, telling them what he knew and did not know. He asked people to help each other out.” What was remarkable about his leadership, in the context of therapism?

CHS: He had the right instinct. People don’t need strangers. They want to rely on the natural structures that always support them: families and churches and so on. Some people don’t have those kinds of supports, and they should be provided; the main job of politicians is to make sure that infrastructure is intact.

SS: The tsunami provided another example. One of the first things that the Sri Lankan government wanted to do was to get the schools open to preserve structure and provide a healthy distraction. They don’t need trauma counselors out there infiltrating the area.

The idea is to build on what people have. This is not to mitigate the misery; it’s to say, why is this a psychiatric problem? The encouraging thing is that the aid organizations have started to realize this.

How does therapism manifest itself in schools?

CHS: There are increasing numbers of educators who think that children should be protected from competition. On the playground, there are efforts to replace dodge ball and tag with games where no one is ever “out.” Well, life isn’t like that. Everyone doesn’t win. And what we question is, are children strengthened by being protected from every possibility of disappointment and challenge?

Inside the classroom, there are educators who want to liberate children from what they call an “ideology of achievement.” There are people who believe we shouldn’t test children. We shouldn’t even use red pens because if they see red marks on a paper, that implies judgment.

You also describe specific efforts to make children express themselves and emote.

CHS: One example of therapism is forcing children who might be healthy repressors to be highly expressive about their emotions. There’s no evidence that that helps. There’s no good educational or psychological reason to force a child to expose emotions if they don’t wish to.

There are classes where during roll call – when Suzy says “here” and Tommy says “here” – the child is supposed to identify his emotions at the moment. So Suzy says, “I’m mellow.” Tommy says, “I’m upset.” This should not be going on in schools.

Why not?

CHS: The classroom is a place where a child should be learning about the great world outside himself. There’s nothing easier than getting a child to be self-absorbed. We need to make them curious about things larger than themselves.

Where did this all begin?

CHS: In Chapter 2, we look at the human potential movement in the 1960s and ’70s, with Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. The idea that if you only have high self-esteem and you live in a milieu of total acceptance, that you would then develop a very strong ego and become a good, fulfilled person. Well, it turned out there’s no evidence for that.

What do you hope that people take away from this book?

CHS: People don’t know how schools have changed. We encourage awareness, and we would like to have more debate. We are trying to remind people that this therapeutic ethic is relatively new and can be challenged.