Abigail Shrier’s new book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up opens with an epigraph quoting Lana Del Rey’s song “Born to Die.” Lana’s lyrics (sometimes love is not enough / and the road gets tough / I don’t know why) are perhaps apt as an anthem for people around my age. Despite being born in a world where unlimited information is available at our fingertips, many of us Zoomers can’t figure our lives out. We grew up in a world where smartphones are ubiquitous and we are expected to curate social-media personas, where a few taps of an account’s Instagram Story may show, in sudden succession, a slide about one’s stress-relief routine, a smudged mirror selfie, and a solemn infographic about the culture-war cause du jour.
And we’re also the most anxious and depressed generation to ever exist, although the next generation might snatch our participation trophies from us when our helicopter parents take their eyes off just a second.
What happened? How did a generation that grew up in far better circumstances compared to any other time in history end up in this miasma of mental health issues?
Shrier, a lawyer by training, files suit against the rise of therapeutic culture. She goes around the country and interviews experts to document and analyze the rise of this sudden new phenomenon, similar to her last book on the rise of rapid-onset gender dysphoria. It turns out that somewhere around the turn of the century, middle-class parents increasingly began to cede their intuition to an army of therapists, psychologists, and counselors. Psychiatric jargon jumped off prescription pads and became parental parlance. Therapy-speak saturates our social interactions. Everything now needs a fancy label, as if the complexities of human behavior could be reduced to a simple Wikipedia-able term. Kids don’t have messy handwriting, they have “dyspraxia.” Kids aren’t just shy, they have “generalized anxiety disorder.” Acting a bit weird? “Autism.” A rambunctious kid? “Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.” Picky eating? “Avoidant restrictive food intake disorder.” Each diagnosis funnels more money into the coffers of the therapeutic regime, which in turn allows it to create ever-more boutique diagnoses, creating a feedback machine of ever-expanding therapy-speak bloat.
It’s not just parents—it’s also the schools. Students walk into classes where “social-emotional learning” has become the new prized pedagogy, where kids begin their days with “emotion check-ins” that force them to declare how they feel in front of the whole class. In one particularly egregious example, Shrier discusses sitting through a presentation titled “Embedding SEL in Math” where participants were asked to divulge their feelings about math (“Anxiety!” was a common response) before asking them to look at an assortment of shapes and asking, “Which one doesn’t belong?”—to which the answer was “They all belong. No wrong answers. Everyone wins!” Why learn about geometric shapes when one can shape young minds instead?
Social-emotional learning is just one way schools are orienting their administrative duties towards expanding the therapeutic regime. Kids are asked to fill out surveys with questions like “During the past 12 months, did you ever seriously consider attempting suicide?”—questions that may actually normalize and increase the risk of suicide and self-harm. With each “yes” answer, the therapeutic regime justifies itself in trying to fix the problems it’s created.
The elephant in the waiting room, though, is trauma. Shrier links the current totemic obsession with trauma to the work of psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, whose runaway-bestseller book The Body Keeps the Score has become a pop-culture phenomenon. (I can’t walk into a bookstore these days without being menaced by the Matisse painting on its cover.) Shrier thoroughly debunks van der Kolk’s claims that trauma is essentially behind everything while skewering his white whale: “Can’t concentrate? Trauma! Trouble forming relationships? Trauma! Tightness in your chest? Trauma! Cancer, substance abuse, sexual promiscuity, stroke, irritable bowel syndrome? Trauma, trauma, trauma, trauma!”
Shrier then turns her attention to a therapy guru with over eight million Instagram followers, who posted about an alleged “invisible trauma” called “parentification,” where a child has to play a parental role in some cases. One instance in which parentification allegedly happens is through being an immigrant: “Parents who sacrifice and bring their child to another country for a better life are forced to rely on their children for help with language, paying bills, or understanding cultural norms. Children play adult roles out of necessity.”
I remember doing all these things for my immigrant parents. Yet this was the first time I’d seen someone frame this phenomenon as trauma. If I had been trained to view helping my parents with cultural and linguistic matters as traumatic, perhaps I would’ve internalized that and have become depressed thinking about how “traumatic” mundane elements of my life were. Indeed, by spreading the net of trauma wider, therapeutic culture is iatrogenic: it’s a supposed cure that only makes the patient worse off.
This example is just one of many Shrier gives in this book contrasting the people pushing therapeutic culture with those from other countries’ cultures. The examples she gives of therapeutic culture are often pulled from well-to-do politically-left-of-center spaces, such as the Tony Spence School in Manhattan (tuition: $60,880/year) and the Slate parenting Facebook group. There are times when she assumes that readers fit a similar mold, like where she claims “Here are some decisions we once (but no longer) extended to teens in America: Whether to go to college. (Nope, everyone goes.)” The second parenthetical aside implies that she expects the reader to be someone from a community where practically every student goes to college. In a way, this is a good sign: it shows that therapeutic culture is still limited in its spread.
In contrast to the therapeutic culture promoters (one can almost hear the NPR and taste the oat milk latte through the page), Shrier writes that “Many of those who are willing to provide straight talk turned out to be immigrants.” She praises the cultural norms of the Hispanic immigrants near where she lives in Los Angeles, noting that Latino immigrants that assimilate to American norms actually are worse off mentally than ones that don’t. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood of mostly Hispanic and Asian immigrants—not exactly the types to shell out $200 an hour for therapy sessions for their kids, that’s for sure. Shrier also goes beyond America to praise Japanese and Israeli ways of raising children.
One undercurrent rippling throughout the book was the emphasis on community over individual self-expression. Shrier observes that Hispanic immigrants often have strong family bonds while “Our kids don’t have that. They don’t have a stable web of connections who care about them or really know them. Our constant emphasis on our kids’ uniqueness reinforces this sense that they need be preoccupied only with themselves.” It was then where I thought back to Robert Putnam’s famous work Bowling Alone that showed the stark decline of civic engagement throughout American society. Putnam and Shrier’s books combined can be seen as a cause-and-effect: as people became ever-more atomized and isolated from one another, the ground was fertile for therapeutic culture to move in as a (failed) solution. And as smartphones and social media further detach us from physical reality, we’ve only been getting more depressed as a result.
Shrier (perhaps channeling David Foster Wallace) observes that “We’ve all been swimming in therapeutic concepts so long we no longer note the presence of the water.” Indeed, my generation is so used to the language of therapy that we don’t even notice the tides rising. We simply need to remain resilient until the rain lets up. This review will end the way she began her book: with the wisdom of Lana Del Rey.
Like a barge at sea / in the storm I stay clear.
Sheluyang Peng is a writer living in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
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