Why am I interested in Bad Therapy: Why Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier?
And not just interested, but even initially very sympathetic, and curious if this could be a resource to point people toward.
As a pastor and theologian, I see the growing spiritual and mental health crisis central to our cultural moment, and therefore as the place into which we need to skillfully proclaim the gospel. And I see this book as one among many diagnosing this contemporary moment.
Unfortunately, as I’ll explain in the next post, Bad Therapy probably won’t spark the kind of conversation around mental health in Gen Z that is needed because its style of writing will alienate those who most need to hear the message.
But as I’ll explain in this post, and the several following, I do think Shrier is putting her finger on an issue (on many related issues), and she certainly is not the only person.
MAJOR REMINDER: Nothing I’m saying here or elsewhere means that I think all therapy is bad, and that mental illness is just a sin issue (see our podcast). It is perfectly allowable for me to encourage therapy for some people while also being concerned about our “therapeutic culture” and where it is headed in general. If you can’t hold those two views in tension, my writing will probably be frustrating for you.
I write about what I’m interested in, not what readers on the right or left find interesting (which ends up being one of my criticisms of Bad Therapy—more on that next post).
So, to be specific from Bad Therapy, why am I sympathetic to this kind of passage early in the book?
“How did the first generation to raise kids without spanking produce the first generation to declare they never wanted kind of their own? How did kids raised so gently come to believe they had experienced debilitating childhood trauma? How did kids who received far more psychotherapy than any previous generation plunge into a bottomless well of despair?”
Here are the ideas and sources fueling my sympathy.
TL;DR
Nikolas Rose shows the social and political formations within mental health conversations and interventions.
Ole Jacob Madsen offers an insider critique of the problematic influence of psychology in our society.
Martin and McLellan look at the unintended consequences of psychological interventions within schools.
Nassim Taleb shows us that we aren’t as smart as we think we are, and often our good intentions have bad results.
All of this adds up to many people outside of the reactionary right pointing at how maybe our therapeutic culture isn’t as good for us as we might think.
Our Psychiatric Future —Nikolas Rose
Through many books, Rose has offered an evenhanded critique of the history, development, and future of psychiatry and psychology, asking if we really are living in a mental health crisis, what it means to claim that mental health is a human right, looking at the rise of psychopharmacology, and whether and how mental disorders are (or are not) brain disorders. Rose is not a scathing and dismissive critic of psychology, but extends Foucault’s insights about the rise of mental health clinics and hospitals to ask about the social and political functioning, and the formations of power, of mental health practices.
Rose is by far the only person engaged with these questions. Just look to the excellent Psychiatry at the Margins or The Mind, Brain, Body Digest for very up-to-date discussions of these issues.
Basically, how the brain works and how to fix problems in the brain are far more complex than your doctor, therapist, or online search might have you believe.
All of which prime me toward a sympathetic reading of Bad Therapy.
The Therapeutic Turn: How psychology altered Western culture — Ole Jacob Madsen
Madsen is a Norwegian psychiatrist and professor of psychology. From the back cover summarizing aspects of the book: “A recurring concern with psychological solutions is that they often provide individual solutions to structural problems. As a result, psychologists may be inadvertently increasing the burden on the shoulders of the people they are meant to help and, at the same time, our capacity to understand individual suffering in the light of major historical and political changes in society is becoming increasingly clouded.”
This excellent insider critique by Madsen makes me curious about Bad Therapy.
The Education of Selves: How Psychology Transformed Students— Jack Martin and Ann-Marie McLellan
Having lived through the California experiment in promoting self-esteem in the 80s and 90s (I say that I’m terrible at spelling but feel really good about it), this book was an eye opener about psychological interventions in public schools.
One topic among many, was how the goal of increasing self-esteem in students totally backfired, neither increasing academic or social performance as thought. Rather, through testing and trying to build self-esteem in students we merely managed to convince a generation that self-esteem is the most important thing, even though the research shows this isn’t true.
And the generation raised to believe that self-esteem (believing that self-esteem is created through belonging and acceptance), is now raising their own kids from that perspective, which is is the cultural moment that Bad Therapy is speaking into.
To be clear, I’m not against belonging and acceptance. Just that belonging and acceptance aren’t all it takes to build mental health resilience. Like happiness, self-esteem is rarely achieved when it is the goal.
Three Books by Nassim Taleb
To finish off, my perspective on the social sciences, economics, politics, and yes, therapy, is shaped by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
In Antifragile: Things the Grow from Disorder, a brilliant book that every pastor and therapist should read—partly because it is so fun and different from whatever you usually read, Taleb shows over and over how natural systems are naturally antifragile (they get stronger through stress and disorder), but that our modern world, in seeking to remove all distress and disorder, has actually made us more and more fragile..
For example, our muscles grow through the stress of exercise and the disorder of the natural work. And our immune system becomes healthy when exposed, early in life, to a dirty environment. If not, our muscles atrophy and we develop a weak immune system (we become fragile).
Taleb is speaking primarily of politics and economic, but his insights directly relate to the realms of social psychology, traumatology, and therapy.
In Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, Taleb discusses how, in our bureaucratic world, full of experts who manage from a distance, we now have decision-makers who don’t have skin in the game, who are not effected by the negative downside of their decisions, but only gain from the positive upside.
In other works, our modern world is full of people who don’t have skin in the game, who seek all the credit and none of the blame for their decisions, and who are more than willing to intervene guided by their best intensions but are immune to the unintended consequences.
An example would be financial advisors who get the credit for gains in their managed portfolios, but don’t lose their saving when the market gets wiped out.
Another example would be the well-meaning educational psychologists who thought focusing on self-esteem would benefit students, and it didn’t.
The last book by Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, which was his first major book outing the financial gurus as being totally clueless, focuses on how human risk assessment and risk management is generally awful because our mind plays tricks on us. We are “fooled by randomness” and see patterns and meaning where there are none, confusing noise (meaningless information) from signal (meaningful information), and drawing actionable conclusions where we shouldn’t.
This failure of risk management means we often fail to identify who really is “at risk” in a situation (think of “at risk kids”), and intervene in ways that make things worse rather than better.
What does this all mean?
Now, all this background information and reading has created within me an urgency about our current mental health crisis, concerned about its causes, and curious to hear from those who don’t think that more therapy is always more better.
But it doesn’t mean I’m disposed to automatically agree with everything that Abigail Shrier argues—and in fact I don’t.
But I do think she is putting her finger on many issues that we need to talk more about, and by “we” I mean pastors, therapists, and all who are concerned about the younger generations.
Helpful stuff here, Geoff. I engaged in some of these themes with my own therapist recently. We discussed the limitations of individual therapy, the helpful possibilities and potential harm of 1-1 therapy. What are the boundaries of the self? What can we reasonably expect as outcomes? What does it mean for a collective society to be composed of individualized psychotherapeutic treatments?
Fascinating!