In Bad Therapy (Penguin Random House, 2024), Abigail Shrier suggests that maybe we’ve focused on our kids’ emotions a little too much. All that talk and attention about how they feel is only making them feel worse, she says.
Afterall, she points out, we have more licensed therapists than ever, and a social-emotional learning focus in more classrooms than ever, and yet nationally we have more children diagnosed with anxiety and depression than ever.
And their parents embrace these diagnoses, Shrier says, because they release both child and parent from responsibility: “We needed our kids and everyone around them to know our kids weren’t shy, they had ‘social anxiety disorder’ or ‘social phobia.’ They weren’t poorly behaved, they had ‘oppositional defiant disorder,’” she writes.
Shrier claims teenagers, too, welcome diagnoses and carry them like a badge of honor. One teenager confessed to Shrier, “I’ve noticed with a lot of people who’ll use their mental issues—it’s almost like a conversation piece. It’s almost like a trend.”
Shrier—who is not a psychologist but interviewed quite a few in her research—finds blames for pretty much everyone around adolescents: the teachers who buy into social emotional learning and make children report how they’re feeling each day, the doctors’ office that makes every adolescent fill out a mental health questionnaire, the therapists who keep kids in therapy longer than necessary and make them ruminate on their problems, and worst of all, the parents who practiced “gentle parenting,” seeking kids’ happiness above all else, removing all obstacles and not allowing children to build resilience.
Shrier isn’t afraid of making controversial statements. Her previous book, Irreversible Damage (Regnery, 2021), dove into the transgender trend that had grown exponentially among young women, claiming that outside influences such as social media and mental health professionals are to blame for the epidemic that is leaving so many people permanently infertile.
In her books, Shrier references her Jewish faith but does not seem to be religiously motivated in her opinions. In Irreversible Damage, she doesn’t take an anti-gay stance, or even an anti-transgender stance. Adults who are informed enough to make their own decisions are not her concern. Her concern, in both of her books, are malleable adolescents.
Shrier raises some valid questions and I think she's a voice worth considering. I found some of her insights to be personally helpful. Even though I’m the mother of three teenagers, I was able to read the book with a curious objectivity, as none of my boys has exhibited anxiety or depression to this point.
So as I read, I wondered how the book would be received by families I know who do have their children in counseling or have accepted a diagnosis for their child. Shrier starts off the book by acknowledging that there are legitimate diagnoses and true mental health illnesses experienced by adolescents. But then she says there’s this other group of kids, this growing group, who seem to be influenced into their emotional distress by their environment. “This book,” she writes in the Author’s Note, “is about a second, far larger cohort: the worriers; the fearful; the lonely, lost and sad.”
It would be difficult not to get defensive if you were the parent of a child diagnosed with anxiety and it was implied that really you just have a “worrier” on your hands. And yet this could very well be the case.
A parent of a child with a mental health diagnosis might want to be sure they’re open to examination before picking up this book.
But there are plenty of audiences that would benefit from reading Bad Therapy, including those considering going into counseling or teaching, anyone who works with families and wants insight into what’s going on in homes and schools, and parents of younger children, for whom these ideas could shape parenting decisions.
Those who don’t have time to read it right now can learn about Shrier’s findings by listening to her recent interviews on the Honestly podcast, available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts app. You'll find her interviewed plenty of other places too if you just look.
Select quotes from Bad Therapy:
“Bosses and teachers report—and young people agree—that members of the rising generation are utterly underprepared to accomplish basic tasks we expect all adults to dispatch: ask for a raise; show up for work during a period of national political strife; show up for work at all; fulfill obligations they undertake without requiring extensive breaks to attend to their ‘mental health.’”
“If you track a person’s emotions over the course of a day or even a week, [Michael Linden, professor of psychiatry at Charite University Hospital in Berlin] told me, happiness is actually a very rare emotion, statistically speaking. Of our sixty-thousand wakeful seconds each day, only a tiny percentage are spent in a state we would call ‘happy.’ Most of the time we are simply ‘okay’ or ‘fine,’ trying to ignore some minor discomfort: feeling a little tired, run down, upset, stressed out, irritated, allergic or in pain. Regularly prompting someone to reflect on their current state will—if they are being honest—elicit a raft of negative responses.”
“’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, what we do is throw oil into the fire.” —Yulia Chentsova Dutton, Culture and Emotions Lab at Georgetown University, quoted in Bad Therapy
“'We are basically telling them that this deeply imperfect signal'”—that is, what they are feeling—”'is always valid, is always important to track, pay attention, and then use to guide your behavior, use it to guide how you act in a situation.'” Dutton quoted in Bad Therapy
“Police officers who responded to a plane crash and then underwent debriefing sessions exhibited more disaster-related hyperarousal symptoms eighteen months later than those who did not receive the treatment. Burn victims exhibited more anxiety after therapy than those left untreated. Breast cancer patients have left peer support groups feeling worse about their condition than those who opted out.”
“Psychiatrist Samantha Boardman wrote candidly about a patient who quit therapy after a few weeks of treatment. ‘All we do is talk about the bad stuff in my life,’ the patient told Boardman. ‘I sit in your office and complain for 45 minutes straight. Even if I am having a good day, coming here makes me think about the negative things.’”