Bad Therapy
Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up
-
-
5.0 • 5 Ratings
-
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the author of Irreversible Damage, an investigation into how mental health overdiagnosis is harming, not helping, children
'A pacy, no-holds barred attack on mental health professionals and parenting experts ...thought-provoking' Financial Times
'A message that parents, teachers, mental health professionals and policymakers need to hear' New Statesman
In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z's mental health is worse than that of previous generations. What's gone wrong?
In Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn't the kids – it's the mental-health experts. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with child psychologists, parents, teachers and young people themselves, she reveals that most of the therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and few proven benefits: for instance, talk therapy can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression; while 'gentle parenting' can encourage emotional turbulence in children as they lash out, desperate for an adult to be in charge. Bad Therapy is a must-read for anyone questioning why our efforts to support our kids have backfired.
Customer Reviews
Wise counsel
4.5 stars
The author is an American lawyer, journalist, and commentator, who rose to prominence/infamy, depending on your political leanings, after publication of her first book Irreversible Damage: Teenage Girls and the Transgender Craze, in 2020. Public reviews of that are all 4/5 stars or 1 star, with virtually nothing in between. Ditto this one. As John Cougar Mellencamp once said, “Ain’t that America, home of the free.”
Ms S’s thesis is basically this. Kids nowadays have a lot more mental health problems than they used to, in large part because there’s a lot more “therapists” (psychologists, counsellors etc) around. The therapists all want to pay off their student loans and buy an EV, so they have a vested interest in spruiking the benefits of therapy, which is presumed by all, not just the therapists, to be a universal good with no adverse consequences.
Meanwhile, widespread access to social media almost certainly does have adverse consequences. Ergo, get kids off their smartphones and they won’t need therapy. Easy-peasy. To which I say maybe, and good luck getting them to part company with those phones.
Ms S writes well and makes convincing arguments, albeit based on selective, largely anecdotal, evidence. Necessarily so, unfortunately. It’s difficult enough to do reproducible unbiased research in hard sciences.
Kids having too much therapy strikes me as a middle class, predominantly white middle class, problem, for now at least. But when kids who have therapy while growing up become therapists themselves, who knows what’s next?
The sooner AI takes over the better. What say you, Mr Altman?