The kids are not alright. Mental health has never been worse among western youth because of, and not in spite of, society-wide efforts to address it. As Abigail Shrier explains in Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up, the therapeutic professions are “minting young patients faster than anyone could possibly cure them.”
Like D.A.R.E., the infamous antidrug program that accidentally increased kids’ interest in illegal drugs, scholastic use of mental health diagnosis is making kids into anxious, fragile people. “For thousands of years, until the therapeutic turn in parenting, societies took it for granted that parents’ primary job was to transmit their values to their children,” Shrier writes.
“Once parents decided the goal of child-rearing was emotional wellness, they effectively conceded that the actual authorities were therapists.” Worse, the therapeutic approach is nonjudgmental, unpunishing, so it does not instill self-control.
“Therapy can hijack our normal processes of resilence, interrupting our psyche’s ability to heal itself, in its own way, at its own time,” creating chronological adults in arrested states of juvenile development. Parents who won’t let a 9-year-old child walk around the block alone end up with a child who never leaves the house at 13, as if they have raised the child in a terrarium.
It starts with feelings. Everyone is asking the child how they feel right now. Teachers begin the class by checking in with everybody’s feelings. Parents attend to their child’s every feeling. Bad feelings are seen as problems for society rather than opportunities for the child to grow up a little bit by getting over it.
Our “feelings fool us all the time,” Shrier writes. Keeping kids in a “state orientation” rather than an “action orientation” makes them hyper-aware of their fallible emotions instead of the world around them. They get lost in rumination and never develop habits of prevention.
At this point in Shrier’s book, I was reminded of a cult classic science fiction movie, Equilibrium. In the film, a post-apocalyptic totalitarian state suppresses the emotions of the populace through enforced dosage with a drug called “Librium,” ostensibly in order to prevent further catastrophic wars.
Christian Bale plays Preston, a regime enforcer who gets in touch with his feelings. He encounters a leader of the underground resistance movement named Jurgen, played by William Fichtner, who explains that “the first thing you learn about emotion is that it has its price. A complete paradox. But without restraint, without control, emotion is chaos.”
But how is that not the same kind of control as the tyrannical government, Preston asks? “The difference is that when we want to feel, we can,” Jurgen replies. Self-regulation, not state regulation, is the skill that separates us from other animals.
Made in 2002, the film anticipates the present, though with a bleak, Orwellian aesthetic. Shrier suggests we actually live in something more like Aldous Huxley’s pharmaceutical consumerist dystopia: rather than a top-down, government-mandated, one-shot solution for our feelings, we have entire professions that pretend to cure them for us using a whole medicine cabinet.
Shrier makes a distinction between real mental illness, defined by dysfunction, and “the worriers; the fearful; the lonely, lost, and sad” who too often seek diagnosis as a form of identity formation. “When you start a child on meds, you risk numbing him to life at the very moment he’s learning to calibrate risks and handle life’s ups and downs,” she writes.
Like the Librium of the film, a medication can deaden emotions without instilling an ability to cope with them. “When you anesthetize a child to vicissitudes of life and failure and love and loss and disappointment when he’s meeting these for the first time, you’re depriving him of the emotional musculature he will need as an adult.”
In most cases, she says “it is worth turning your life upside down” as a parent in order to prevent a child from medicalizing.
Non-medical interventions can also be harmful; Shrier advises parents “don’t send your kid off to therapy unless she absolutely requires it,” and warns that all too often, group therapy is where kids learn new ways to be ill. Patients can be made worse by bad therapy and unnecessarily dependent on therapists.
Most of all, she says, we must stop listening to ‘the experts.’ We are the experts on our own kids, and it is our job to make them resilient. “Resilience is not something that experts help you build—it’s a process that occurs on its own, through the normal course of facing life’s challenges and surmounting them.”
Constant safety monitoring by teachers and parents alike creates anxiety where none existed. Kids are deprived of “real play, of the developmentally beneficial sort,” that “involves risk, negotiation, and privacy from adults.”
Contrary to our protective instincts, “the weight of pscyhological research demonstrates what kids need most is for their parents (and technology) to stop interrupting, monitoring, curating—diverting them from the organic miracle of growing up.”
Shrier does not spend ink on the term “social contagion” in this book. Unlike her previous work, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, there is almost no mention here of the ‘gender identity’ phenomenon. Still, she has described the larger conditions in which the cult of the ‘trans child’ has thrived.
When Shrier’s son got a stomachache, a visit to the ER somehow required mental health staff to attempt to interview him, alone, with “a series of escalating questions about killing himself.” She refused.
Schools also survey children about suicidal ideation with increasing frequency. “These surveys do not help those kids,” Shrier asserts. “These surveys simply present to all children the ontology of a darkly degraded world and convince them that they inhabit it.”
Counselors, social psychologists, and social workers form a drama triangle with parents. Teachers are doing psychotherapy without a license when they perform “Social Emotional Learning,” or SEL, in class. Therapized classrooms undermine the hard work of qualified therapists working with kids who actually need their help.
If you wanted to do the opposite of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to a whole generation, you would do this.
Schools are becoming less safe. “Restorative Justice destroys and ruins schools” by doing away with consequences, Shrier argues. She deplores “a school regime that demands no self-discipline from students, believing such expectation unreasonable if not unevolved.” When misbehavior is excused as a mental health requirement, no one wins.
Educators use a scale called ACE, for “adverse childhood experience,” as a diagnostic tool. Thus they manage to “dial down expectations of millions of American kids” with a soft bigotry of low expectations.
It is psuedoscience, for “like fortunes told by readers of palms and tarot cards, the childhood trauma explanation for adult dissatisfaction is unfalsifiable.”
“The idea is slippery, it evades serious judgment, and because it both seems to explain all of our troubles and lets us off the hook for fixing them, it slides down so easily,” Shrier says. The idea that we carry “body memory” of trauma is “a bill of goods,” Dutch psychologist Bessel van der Kolk tells her, yet it is assumed as true in public education policy.
Whereas the parents of Shrier’s generation knew “psychologists were the last people you should consult on how to raise normal kids,” as parents themselves, her generation has treated “perfectly average markers of an eighties childhood as vectors of emotional injury.”
In a word, parental authority has been defamed as abuse.
Shrier refers to many books. We could fill the space between Abigail Shrier’s own two books with some titles reviewed here at The Distance, and imagine them re-issued collectively as a boxed set with a single theme.
We would begin with No Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes, an account of what went wrong when activists took over the UK’s only gender clinic, and how they undermined the authority of parents.
Then we would add the accounts of families struggling with the modern mental health crisis. Reading the anthology Parents with Inconvenient Truths about trans: Tales From the Home Front in the Fight to Save Our Kids, it is striking that success often follows whenever parents adopt an authoritative model of parenting.
Sasha Ayad, Lisa Marchiano, and Stella O’Malley are psychotherapists and the authors of When Kids Say They're Trans: A Guide for Parents. In this book, they want parents to take back their authority. Take the smart phone, take away the internet, take a firm stand where needed. Be reasonable when they are being unreasonable. In other words: be parents.
Dr. Miriam Grossman also wants to restore authoritative parenting in Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness. She writes that families are better off removing children from schools and fleeing the state than dealing with a child protective services agency that wants to medicalize their child.
“We are not the subordinates of the school psychologist or the pediatrician or our kids’ teachers,” Shrier writes. “We are more important than all of them combined—as far as our kids are concerned.”
“Claims from experts that they know—or, more laughably, that they care—what’s best for our kids with anything comprable to the degree that we do ought to be met with derision, contempt, the creeps.”
“They watch a rising tide of adolescent suffering and present themselves as its solution. Most of them ought to be fired on the spot.”
Parents cannot be therapists, either. “For at least a generation, Mom hasn’t provided her children escape from the quackery of wellness culture, and she certainly is no bulwark against it,” Shrier writes. “She is an ersatz therapist, practicing bad therapy on kids whose emotions grow increasingly unruly, whose behavior eludes the traps set by her affected questioning.”
Parents must take up their authority again. Take the smart phones away from the kids and send them outside to play. Accept that childhood risks like climbing trees and skinning knees have rewards. Let us stop trying to grow our kids under glass.