Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy

2,559 words

Abigail Shrier
Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
New York: Sentinel, 2024

Abigail Shrier is a journalist associated with the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW) who is known for her writing on adolescent girls who identify as transgender. Her earlier book, Irreversible Damage, was previously reviewed at Counter-Currents. Her most recent book, Bad Therapy, takes aim at modern therapy culture and accuses mental health professionals of inducing distress in otherwise healthy young people.

I’ll start with the book’s merits. Most of Shrier’s criticisms of therapy culture and the pediatric mental health complex are compelling and well deserved. Young people are coddled, overmedicated, and encouraged to stew in their neuroses, all of which undermine resilience. Therapy culture, particularly on social media, promotes identification with one’s “trauma” and supposed mental illnesses and, at its worst, shames people who break out of this mold. Self-improvement is often regarded with suspicion in Leftist spaces steeped in therapy culture. The masculine virtues of fortitude and personal responsibility are regarded as outdated and “harmful.” This ethos amplifies young people’s distress and dysfunction.

Therapy culture promotes a narrative in which the root cause of all one’s undesirable personality traits and maladaptive behaviors is either “trauma” (which encompasses seemingly every form of distress and irrevocably scars one for life) or some sort of mental disorder. This is convenient, because it allows one to blame everyone but oneself and avoid taking responsibility for one’s actions. It also lends one moral authority in today’s victim-obsessed culture.

Shrier points out that studies contending that “trauma” results in brain damage, poorer health, addiction, and other undesirable outcomes are flawed because they rely on retrospective surveys (respondents searching for an explanation for their suboptimal present circumstances are naturally likely to have a bias in favor of reporting past adversity) and do not account for confounding variables. Her takedown of the quack Bessel van der Kolk’s junk science is a highlight of the book.

The “trauma” narrative is politically expedient because it provides an excuse for non-white misbehavior and attaches a stigma to punishing it. Non-white criminals are recast as helpless victims suffering from the “trauma” of living under “white supremacy.” Obama’s “Dear Colleague” Letter threatened schools with loss of funding if they suspended or expelled too many non-white students and recommended “restorative practices, counseling, and structured systems of positive interventions” as alternatives to traditional punishment (p. 62). Unsurprisingly, such strategies have proven to be an ineffective means of reducing violence in schools.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of therapy culture is its role in contributing to the trend of family estrangement (27% of Americans are estranged from a family member). Therapists encourage patients to blame their issues on their parents and goad them into thinking of well-meaning family members as “toxic” or “narcissistic.” Gender therapists in particular are quick to affirm young people’s transgender identities and encourage them to cut off “transphobic” family members. Young people’s suggestibility makes them vulnerable to this sort of manipulation.

Shrier ably documents all of this. That said, Bad Therapy ultimately left me cold.

Bad Therapy is an attempt to answer the question of why young people today are “the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless, and fearful generation on record” (p. 7). Her contention that young people are merely “emotional hypochondriacs” whose imagined distress is manufactured by mental health professionals is unsatisfying. The issues facing young people are real, and the tendency of conservatives to dismiss their concerns is one of the more frustrating and counter-productive impulses on the Right.

Shrier reminisces about her grandmother, who endured poverty, polio, motherlessness, and the Second World War, yet retained a sunny outlook on life. Shrier contrasts her grandmother’s optimism with the words of an anonymous young man who was born in 1999: “We have no future and no hope. We are the end of history” (p. 70). What changed? According to Shrier, misguided therapists and “gentle” parents are to blame: “We surrendered our faith in the native human ability to surmount hardship — and told our kids that they could not possibly recover, let alone emerge stronger” (p. 71).

It does not seem to occur to Shrier that most children do not frequent therapists. At one point, Shrier speaks of “children born today, gently raised in Brentwood and Park Slope and Lincoln Park.” It’s a telling aside; these are some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country.

Shrier is an affluent Jewish woman who probably mostly interacts with people like herself. But the average American child is not growing up in an affluent Jewish family in Park Slope. Millions of white American children are witnessing the dissolution of their communities, face an uncertain economic future, and are taught to be ashamed of their heritage. These issues are less immediate for Shrier. Therapy looms larger in her imagination because she lives in a world where every other child sees a therapist and is on a raft of medications.

More children are being exposed to “social-emotional learning” in schools, but I find it hard to believe that filling out a survey on mental health every once in a while or merely being asked “How are you feeling?” by a teacher wreaks havoc on a child’s mental state. These claims would appear to be at odds with Shrier’s thesis that children are naturally resilient.

The use of mental health surveys in schools and the introduction of “social-emotional learning” into school curricula are certainly examples of bureaucratic meddling and the feminization of the education system. The job of teachers is to impart children with knowledge, not monitor their emotional state. But the claim that “social-emotional learning” is a significant contributor to young people’s distress is dubious.

Shrier has a bizarre allergy to any form of introspection regarding emotions. According to her, being prompted to reflect on one’s emotional state in any capacity invites negative emotions and rumination. She cites a suspiciously morose professor of psychiatry by the name of Michael Linden, who claims that asking children how they are feeling is dangerous because it causes them to reflect on their inevitable unhappiness: “Nobody feels great. . . . Never, never ever” (p. 34).

Shrier emphasizes that emotions are “imperfect and unreliable” and should not be taken at face value. She argues that young people should not pay heed to their emotions. Otherwise, “how will [they] ever hope to function at work?” (p. 34).

The gist of her argument is correct: Emotions should not be venerated or regarded as an infallible mirror of reality. People today equate emotional judgments with truth and moral rightness. Politically incorrect sentiments are “wrong” solely by virtue of inflicting emotional “harm,” objective truth be damned.

Emotions gesture at reality, however, in the same way that pain is generally a good indicator that something is amiss even though sometimes the brain sends false pain signals. If a young person feels that he has “no future and no hope,” something is wrong. Should he ignore this so he can “function at work”?

Shoving one’s discontent and fears aside enables one to “get through a day of school” and be maximally productive (p. 34). This is a useful skill that young people often fail to cultivate. But is “getting through the day” really all that one should aspire to?

This illustrates why conservatives are politically ineffectual: They are more interested in “getting through the day” than contemplating societal ills and building a better world. They fetishize being “beautiful losers” to their detriment. They do not have anything to offer idealistic young people beyond assuring them that everything is swell and telling them to keep their heads down and get to work

Later in the book, after spending several pages railing against prompting young people to reflect on their circumstances and emotions, Shrier offers an argument against treating depression with medication that blew me away. Depression is beneficial, she writes, because it allows one to “take stock” of one’s situation and “contemplate a different approach” (p. 125). It is “evolution’s way of curtailing distraction so that you can reflect unimpeded on your problem” (p. 126). Of course, reflecting on one’s problems is precisely what she condemns earlier in the book. There is no internal logic underlying these positions; it is as if she merely reasoned backward from a knee-jerk aversion to psychiatric interventions.

You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Reactionary Modernism here.

This also applies to her aversion to telling children to take deep breaths when they are upset — effectively telling them to calm down and set their emotions aside. But since it sounds like something a therapist would say, Shrier mocks it.

Stoically plowing ahead and turning a blind eye to unfavorable circumstances is admirable, but sometimes self-defeating. For instance, if you have a roommate who snores, refusing to wear earplugs or use a sound machine will interfere with your sleep and leave you less energized.

You would think this would be common sense. Not to Shrier. In the good old days, children were forced to listen to snoring siblings: “Force a kid to sleep in a house beset by the normal sounds of snoring siblings, whistling of winds, or creaking of joists, and eventually she will sleep” (p. 38).

Children who are sensitive to noise function best in quiet environments. Surely there is a happy medium between coddling a sensitive, perhaps autistic child and refusing to make even the most minor, innocuous concessions to his preferences (tag-free clothes, earplugs, sound machines). The latter will only alienate him and send him running into the arms of the Left — an unfortunate outcome given that sensitive, introverted children are more likely to be intelligent and creative.

Shrier’s thesis that children need to experience discomfort and adversity in order to grow is sound, but said adversity should foster a sense of purpose and personal accomplishment — pushing a child to adopt an exercise regimen, for example. Intentionally depriving a child of something that could easily alleviate suffering does not accomplish this and is instead apt to breed resentment. Pointless suffering is just that: pointless.

Shrier seems to think that giving a child tag-free clothes or a sound machine will render him emotionally fragile and instill him with the view that the world ought to cater to his whims. I fail to see how this is any different from neurotic progressive parents’ fears that lightly spanking children will scar them for life.

Shrier’s failure to consider a happy medium between her methods and “gentle parenting” and is a recurring theme. For instance, she points out that many young people self-harm merely for “attention” and are not actually in the throes of a severe mental health crisis. In such cases, she advises ignoring them as opposed to handing them off to a mental health professional. Why must these be the only options? “Parents who follow the therapists’ direction and embrace their children’s despair breathe life into the monster under the bed,” we are told (p. 25). But it is possible to confront your child and provide guidance without treating the situation as a crisis. Young people who “act out” in search of “attention” might not be suicidal, but they are obviously in some form of distress. If you decide to ignore them, they will simply find solace elsewhere. Again, this increases their odds of becoming part of Leftist subcultures.

After spending the entire book arguing that young people’s distress is primarily iatrogenic in origin, Shrier suddenly introduces a novel explanation out of nowhere: “when you look at societies with very high rates of pathological depression, . . . two things stand out: a high value placed on individualism and high relational mobility (meaning, lots of turnover in the characters that inhabit your life)” (p. 141). What happened to rumination and “gentle parenting”? At any rate, she only devotes about four pages to this.

Shrier frames the loss of community among young people as a result of parental overprotectiveness and unwillingness to let children engage in unsupervised play, which is important for peer bonding. She praises Japanese and Israeli parents for allowing their children to walk to school alone as young as five years old.

A question left unanswered is why Japanese and Israeli parents allow their children to roam the streets unsupervised while American parents do not. An obvious reason is that America is an increasingly low-trust, diverse society. Shrier writes that the ultimate purpose of childhood is “to allow kids to take risks” and experience small doses of adversity in a safe environment; I would agree (p. 147). This occurs at the level of both the family and society at large. High-trust environments provide a sort of safety net that gives children the freedom to independently navigate the world around them, test boundaries, and bond with each other over youthful mischief. White American children no longer have this. (This is one counter to the argument, espoused by both certain Leftists and the Hananias and Spencers of the world, that homogeneous environments are by nature sterile and “boring,” and devoid of risk.)

The primary reason why young people are experiencing more distress than previous generations is not that they are fragile woke snowflakes; it is that they have been deprived of sources of meaning and community. It’s not surprising that people such as Shrier’s grandmother did not experience distress in large numbers as a result of living through the Second World War. Keith Woods mentions in a recent article that the population of psychiatric wards in Paris decreased during both world wars. Humans evolved to make altruistic sacrifices for their tribe in the face of collective adversity.

Shrier actually hints at this in her (surprisingly nuanced) discussion of the pitfalls of the “ACE” (adverse childhood experiences) checklist and the difference between mere “adversity” and “dysfunction.” Certain forms of adversity — e.g., “getting up early to prepare lunches for your younger siblings because your father, a good man who works three jobs, isn’t yet home from the night shift” — cannot be described as dysfunctional and can even be psychologically beneficial (p. 67). Shrier points out that the children who fared the best during the Great Depression were not the wealthiest, but rather those who helped their families by taking on extra work or doing more chores.

The fact that young people have fewer opportunities to experience constructive forms of adversity is not entirely the fault of their parents or therapists. They are not in a position to make altruistic sacrifices for their community or nation because they do not have a community or nation in the first place. That falls under the category of “dysfunction” — and dysfunction requires some sort of intervention.

Shrier’s book is a must-read for neurotic urban parents who micromanage their children’s lives and rush them to the doctor at the slightest worry. In the same way that Jews in Jesus’ time needed to be told to “turn the other cheek” as a corrective to their bloodlust, today’s liberal Jewish parents would benefit from erring in the direction of Shrier’s approach. But they are probably not the ones who will be reading this book. Shrier’s scathing critiques of the transgender movement have effectively exiled her from the liberal mainstream, and I would not be surprised if her readership were comprised entirely of IDW types and normie conservatives.

White conservatives will read Bad Therapy and come away with the impression that young people are snowflakes with fake problems — even as young white people are dying “deaths of despair” all around them — and that supporting and nurturing their children is tantamount to being a woke gay therapist. This is unfortunate.