Bad Therapy

From the author of In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations. Youth suicide rates are climbing, antidepressant prescriptions for children are common, and the proliferation of mental health diagnoses has not helped the staggering number of kids who are lonely, lost, sad and fearful of growing up. What’s gone wrong with America’s youth? In Mental health care can be lifesaving when properly applied to children with severe needs, but for the typical child, the cure can be worse than the disease. <Bad Therapy< is a must-read for anyone questioning why our efforts to bolster America’s kids have backfired--and what it will take for parents to lead a turnaround.

Auteur
Abigail Shrier received the Barbara Olson Award for Excellence and Independence in Journalism in 2021. Her bestselling book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020), was named a “Best Book” by the Economist and the Times. It has been translated into ten languages.

Résumé
**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER.

From the author of Irreversible Damage, an investigation into a mental health industry that is harming, not healing, American children

In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations. Youth suicide rates are climbing, antidepressant prescriptions for children are common, and the proliferation of mental health diagnoses has not helped the staggering number of kids who are lonely, lost, sad and fearful of growing up. What’s gone wrong with America’s youth?

In Bad Therapy, bestselling investigative journalist 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, Shrier explores the ways the mental health industry has transformed the way we teach, treat, discipline, and even talk to our kids. She reveals that most of the therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and few proven benefits. Among her unsettling findings:

• Talk therapy can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression
• Social Emotional Learning handicaps our most vulnerable children, in both public schools and private
• “Gentle parenting” can encourage emotional turbulence – even violence – in children as they lash out, desperate for an adult in charge
  Mental health care can be lifesaving when properly applied to children with severe needs, but for the typical child, the cure can be worse than the disease. Bad Therapy is a must-read for anyone questioning why our efforts to bolster America’s kids have backfired—and what it will take for parents to lead a turnaround.

Échantillon de lecture
Chapter 1

Iatrogenesis

In 2006, I packed up everything I owned and moved from Washington, DC, to Los Angeles to be closer to my then boyfriend. I had only ever visited California once, a few months earlier, when I had flown out to meet his parents. Outside of my boyfriend and his family, every single person who could identify my body in the event of an untimely demise lived on the East Coast.

Then twenty-eight and having recently graduated from law school, I faced the unpleasantness of having become a lawyer. I was restless. My boyfriend had a business in Los Angeles. If I wanted things to work out with him, I needed to move.

But I also knew it was entirely possible that in this new life-his life-I would go crazy. My best friend, Vanessa, lived in DC. We'd both been hired by law firms, which meant long hours and an impossible time difference, as far as calls were concerned. I needed someone to listen to my worries and misgivings on my schedule. I needed a stand-in Vanessa, available every Thursday at six p.m. And for the first time in my life, I could afford one. I hired a therapist.

Every week, for a "fifty-minute hour," my therapist lent me her full attention. If I bored her with my repetition, she never complained. She was a pro. She never made me feel self-absorbed, even when I was. She let me vent. She let me cry. I often left her office feeling that some festering splinter of interpersonal interaction had been eased to the surface and plucked.

She helped me realize that I wasn't so bad. Most things were someone else's fault. Actually, many of the people around me were worse than I'd realized! Together, we diagnosed them freely. Who knew so many of my close relatives had narcissistic personality disorder? I found this solar plexus-level comforting. In quick order, my therapist became a really expensive friend, one who agreed with me about almost everything and liked to talk smack about people we (sort of) knew in common.

I had a great year. My boyfriend proposed marriage. I accepted. And then, a month before we were due to get married, my therapist dropped a bomb: "I'm not sure you two are ready to get married. We may need to do a little more work."

I felt the demoralizing shock of having walked into a plate-glass door.

My therapist was a formidable woman. She had at least fifteen years on me, a doctorate in psychology, and an apparently strong marriage of long duration. She dropped casual references to never missing Pilates. I once caught her at her spotless desk before our session, eating a protein bar she had carefully unwrapped, and marveled at her obvious self-mastery, the dignity she managed to bring to our silly modes of consumption. Maybe I should have been thrown into crisis by her pronouncement, but for whatever reason, I wasn't. For all her training, she was still human and fallible. I had already moved across the country by myself, set up a new life, and by then I knew: I didn't agree with her assessment, and I didn't need her permission, either. I left her a voicemail expressing my gratitude for her help. But, I said, I would be taking some time off.

A few years later, happily married, I resumed therapy with her. Then I tried therapy with a psychoanalyst for a year or so. Every experience I've had with therapy has fallen along a continuum from enlightening to unsettling. Occasionally, it rose to the level of "fun." Learning a little more about the workings of my own mind was at times helpful and often gratifying.

When I agreed with my therapist, I told her so. When I didn't, we talked about that. And when I felt I needed to move on, I did. Which is to say: I was an adult in therapy. I had swum life's choppy waters long enough to have gained some self-knowledge, some self-regard, and a sense of the accuracy of my own perceptions. I could pipe up with: "I think I gave you the wrong impression." Or, "Maybe we're placing a little too much blame on my mom?" Or even, "I've decided to terminate therapy."

Children and adolescents are not typically equipped to say these things. The power imbalance between child and therapist is too great. Children's and adolescents' sense of self is still developing. They cannot correct the interpretations or recommendations of a therapist. They cannot push back on a therapist's view of their families or of themselves because they have no Archimedean point; too little of life has gathered under their feet.

Nevertheless, 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."

A few moms told me, in roundabout verbiage, that they had hired a therapist to surv…