“…the methods and treatments mental health experts champion and dispense are making young people sicker, sadder, and more afraid to grow up.”
Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
The mental health of young people has steadily declined for decades. In Anatomy of an Epidemic, Robert Whitaker references studies which showed that between 1990 and 2007 the number of children diagnosed with a mental illness rose thirty-five-fold. A journal article from Monitor on Psychology notes that less than half of those in Gen Z believe their mental health is good, 46% have been diagnosed with a mental disorder, and 34% take psychiatric medication. While overdiagnosis and the medicalization of everyday life can account for some of this trend, it cannot account for it all, as numerous studies reveal that the youth today are markedly more pessimistic than past generations of children. For example, according to a study by the CDC, suicide rates in adolescents rose 62% between 2000 and 2021, and self-harm among adolescent girls tripled between 2010 and 2020.
In this video, we explore how this crisis, in part, stems from our society’s obsession with mental health – an obsession that has given therapists and educators license to interfere with children’s minds in ways that are making them more anxious and depressed.
One indication of modern society’s obsession with mental health lies with the widespread use of therapy as a preventative measure or to address even minor psychological problems. In her book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, Abigail Shrier notes that 40% of adolescents have attended therapy, and 10% of children aged 5-11 visited a therapist in the past year. And as Shrier explains:
“…parents my age have been signing up their kids and teens for therapy in astonishing numbers, even prophylactically. I talked to moms who hired therapists to help their kids adjust to preschool or to process the death of a beloved cat. One mom told me she put a therapist “on retainer” as soon as her two daughters reached middle school. “So they would have someone to talk to about all the things I never wanted to talk about with my mom.””
Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
Yet as Shrier warns:
“Parents often assume that therapy with a well-meaning professional can only help a child or adolescent’s emotional development. Big mistake. Like any intervention with the potential to help, therapy can harm.”
Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
Iatrogenesis, a Greek word which means “originating with the healer”, refers to the phenomenon whereby a treatment meant to heal ends up harming the patient. Every medical intervention carries iatrogenic risks: for example, surgery to remove a bullet can lead to infection or accidental damage to an organ. In cases of severe physical trauma, medical interventions are justified because the potential to save a life outweighs the risk of causing harm. When it comes to psychological therapy, however, the risk of iatrogenesis can at times exceed the potential psychological benefits. In a journal article titled Psychological Treatments That Cause Harm, the psychologist Scott Lilienfeld discovered that therapy unintentionally harms about 20% of patients, and that some of the more common harms include worsening interpersonal relationships, familial estrangement, intensifying symptoms, increased stress, emotional dependence on the therapist, and the resurfacing of painful memories. And as Abigail Shrier writes:
“Any intervention potent enough to cure is also powerful enough to hurt. Therapy is no benign folk remedy. It can provide relief. It can also deliver unintended harm…This is true even for adults, who in general are much less easily led by other adults. These iatrogenic effects pose at least as great a risk, and likely much more, to children.”
Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
A common practice among therapists that often produces iatrogenic effects is prompting patients them to fixate on their emotions and to reflect and ruminate on how they feel and why. “Bad therapy encourages hyperfocus on one’s emotional states, which in turn makes symptoms worse.”, writes Shrier. One reason dwelling on one’s emotional state tends to make people feel worse is that, for much of the time, most of us don’t feel especially good. Research shows that happiness, joy, and contentment are relatively rare states. Most of the time, most people feel just okay or else experience varying levels of anxiety, fatigue, depression, or stress. This is a normal part of being human, and it demands at times we set aside or ignore how we are feeling in favour of focusing the spotlight of our awareness on taking meaningful action and doing the tasks that need to be done.
“Adults should be telling kids how imperfect and unreliable their emotions can be…Very often, kids should be skeptical that their feelings reflect an accurate picture of the world and even ignore their feelings entirely. (Gasp!) You read that right: a healthy emotional life involves a certain amount of daily repression.”
Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
Bad therapy does not teach children that negative emotions are normal, can be unreliable, and that it is possible to engage in meaningful action even when anxious, depressed, or afraid. Instead, many therapists encourage children to give excessive weight to their emotions and to place them at the forefront of awareness, which tends to make their mental health worse.
“But isn’t it a good idea to inquire regularly about kids’ feelings?! Therapists in America all seem to proceed under the belief that checking in is a little like sticking a thermometer outside your front door: harmless and occasionally helpful. Michael Linden, a professor of psychiatry at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, thinks this is a terrible practice. “Asking somebody ‘how are you feeling?’ is inducing negative feelings. You shouldn’t do that.”…Bad therapy engenders intensive focus on feelings, amplifies emotional dysregulation, increases a sense of hopelessness, of incapacity and a paralytic helplessness against a rising sea of feelings.”
Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
Or as Yulia Chentsova at Georgetown University writes:
“Emotions are highly reactive to our attention to them. Certain kinds of attention to emotions, focus on emotions, can increase emotional distress. And I’m worried that when we try to help our young adults, help our children, [by getting them to focus on and talk about their emotions], what we do is throw oil into the fire.”
Yulia Chentsova, Quoted in Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
Parents who don’t send their children to therapy may think they are sparing them from bad therapy and its iatrogenic effects, but this is not always the case. For bad therapy has found its way into schools and is practiced by school psychologists, counselors, as well as teachers. Or as Shrier writes:
“…far from confinement to the psychoanalyst’s couch, bad therapy is today practiced on almost every kid—by therapists and just as often by nontherapists. The epicenter of bad therapy in your children’s life is their school…Schools jumped at the opportunity to adopt a therapeutic approach to education and announced themselves our “partners” in childrearing. School mental health staffs expanded: more psychologists, more counselors, more social workers.”
Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
