In ‘Bad Therapy,’ Abigail Shrier shows how counterproductive versions of talk therapy became commonplace.
Abigail Shrier does not write like a lawyer. Her prose is lively and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. But her legal training—which includes a JD from Yale Law School—is on display once more in Bad Therapy, a wide-ranging criticism of the therapeutization of American childhood. That’s not to say that legal analysis plays any significant role in the book, but rather that Shrier has mastered the art of remaining disciplined enough to focus only on narrow, but readily defensible, claims regarding a highly charged topic.
Shrier doesn’t decry the practice of therapy wholesale. On the contrary, she credits cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as a real solution for individuals suffering from actual clinical mental health problems. Nor does Shrier engage the question of who or what might ultimately be at fault for our youth mental health crisis—though a close reading of her analysis suggests that she has a compelling answer.
Rather, Shrier urges Americans to reconsider whether it might be counterproductive or even dangerous for versions of talk therapy to have infiltrated the broader culture. Evidence that something isn’t right has been piling up: Youth anxiety and suicides continue to skyrocket, with the latter rising by 150 percent between 2009 and 2019, according to Shrier’s research—and that was before the COVID pandemic. Those are just two of a host of other mental-health adjacent crises, even as parents (who spend upwards of twice as much time with their kids than they did 50 years ago) and professionals monitor kids’ happiness at an unprecedented level.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Dispatch
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Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a fellow at SAPIR: Ideas for a Thriving Jewish Future.
Photo by Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images
