Reflections on "Bad Therapy"
From a parent of children with special needs
Over the last few weeks, a single book has caught America’s attention (although curiously being omitted from the NYT bestseller list) and sparked a discussion about the dangers of therapy culture in our families, schools, and health institutions. That book is, of course, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up by Abigail Shrier.
For those living off-grid in Alaska or simply unaware of the book, Shrier confronts the mental health crisis that Gen Z faces and asks the provocative question, “Why is the most therapeutically-engaged generation in human history so mentally unwell?” The answer, in a nut shell, is that therapy and therapy culture don’t actually help people who don’t need it. In fact, it harms them. (If you want a quick introduction to the book, check out Bari Weiss’ interview with the author.)
While I’m sure the book is just beginning to spark a conversation, I wanted to give an early reflection after reading it. This reflection comes from a unique place. I have five kids, all five of which have some sort of special need. I have one son with severe autism, and four other children who have suffered trauma that resulted in their adoption.
For their privacy, I won’t go into details except to say that, for better or worse, we’ve lived in the therapy culture for some time—actual therapy, therapeutic-styled parenting, medications, etc.
So from the perspective of a special needs parent, here’s what I thought…
Exposing over-diagnosis and faux disorders
The first thing I would say to Shrier, if I ever got the chance to meet her, is “thank you!”
We have reached a point in the U.S. where every person with a slightly quirky personality is self-diagnosing as autistic and every scraped knee is identified as trauma. For people who have actual special needs children, the over-diagnosis of normal human behavior as disabilities and the creation of faux disorders is becoming unbearable.
In a strange expression of the trend, people on TikTok have begun building platforms based on their mental health diagnoses (sometime diagnosed professionally and sometimes self-diagnosed via TikTok). For example, users might claim that they get tired in the afternoon because they have ADHD and need accommodations from their school or workplace. (Don’t we all get tired in the afternoon?) People who claim to have autism might rant that they can’t be expected to grow up and should always be treated like a teenager, despite having the obvious ability to speak and communicate complex ideas over video.
These people cling to disabilities and diagnoses as an identity in the same way others have gravitated toward sexual orientation or race or transgenderism. The world, necessarily, must accept and accommodate them for their inabilities while simultaneously seeing their disabilities as super-abilities.
Meanwhile, those of us living with real disabilities know what true suffering looks like, and it’s offensive to be told that we simply need to reframe our child’s disability as a superpower, or have to watch people identify their pets as service animals because they have ill-defined issues.
As autism parent Jill Escher wrote last year, “No, only for the most privileged can autism be called a superpower.” I’d add that only the most delusional can truly believe that their self-diagnosed faux disorder compares to what truly hurting people are dealing with.
Calling for grit and resilience
Shrier demonstrates that constantly rehashing our trauma and obsessing over our emotions actually makes depression and anxiety worse rather than better. She presses us to reclaim the idea that humans actually posses an amazing ability to find resilience in the face of adversity. Our kids need to develop grit.
She points out that it is normal, for example, for people to experience times of depression and anxiety, and these forces in our lives actually push us to make important life-changing decisions we wouldn’t make otherwise. Instead of allowing normal depression and anxiety to do its work in us, however, we’ve equated all depression and anxiety with chronic and severe disorders that need therapy and medication. By doing this, we’ve undercut our ability to learn to face and overcome hardships in our lives.
My wife and I found this theme in the book particularly encouraging. Therapy culture had taught us to press our kids to talk about their feelings. Without doing this, our kids would develop unhealthy coping strategies. In reality, however, some of our kids simply didn’t need to or want to talk about all their feelings. They were actually better if we didn’t make a big deal out of every situation.
Furthermore, some of our kids needed to hear more often from us that they are going to be okay and they can overcome the challenges in front of them. Therapy culture too often encouraged us to hyper-focus on the challenges, which makes those challenges bigger than they actually are, and to express the negative emotions fully, which gives those emotions more power than they deserve. A lot of times our kids simply needed to hear, “This feels like a big deal, but it isn’t. You can do it.”
That’s not to say that actual therapy from a skilled therapist isn’t necessary in many cases or seasons. But time with a therapist should help kids get to the point where they can develop grit, not become an end in itself.
Kids need parents. Really.
Shrier highlights how therapy culture has sidelined parents, replacing them with therapists, teachers, and other professionals. The message in the air has been: “Parents, you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re probably the problem anyway. Either learn from us, or get out of the way.”
This message has made parents afraid to be parents. As a result, kids feel like their world is out of control. Therapy culture, for example, taught us to model communicating our emotions and struggles openly with our kids so they could learn firsthand how to handle their own disregulation. But this modeling mostly has the opposite effect.
When we are too emotionally open, it scares our kids. They don’t need parents to be human. They need parents to be the unmovable foundation of their world. They need security and stability from parents, which comes from parents being okay, even when they are filled with their own doubts and fears.
This stability also comes from parents possessing authority in the lives of their children and expecting obedience from their children. Kids feel safe when mom and dad are in charge. While therapy culture taught us to give choices, to engage in complex negotiations, and to try to manufacture “natural” consequences to misbehavior, our kids really just wanted us to lovingly give them stability and authority in their lives.
The danger of overreaction
In one of the most thoughtful reviews I’ve read of the book from a Christian perspective, the author concludes, “Bad Therapy isn't the book we need. But the questions raised by Shrier are important, even more so because few other people are questioning therapy culture in an accessible and pointed way.” The reviewer criticizes Shrier’s work as “sloppy, uneven, and (at points) downright annoying to read.”
I understand where the reviewer is coming from. Shrier often utilizes a mocking tone that can make readers feel uncomfortable. The tone of the book could result in readers overreacting to the message and going to the opposite extreme—“All therapy is bad.”
That would be unfortunate because there are good therapists out there, and there are a lot of kids that actually need therapeutic interventions to help them overcome major challenges in their lives.
Bad Therapy isn’t teaching us that “all therapy is bad.” It’s teaching us that bad therapy is bad, and, unfortunately, there is a lot of bad therapy in the world today.
Is Shrier’s book the book that we needed?
What if we’ve become so enmeshed in therapy culture that we can’t really see the world clearly anymore? What if Shrier’s all-out-assault on therapy culture and her mocking tone is exactly what we needed to wake up? What if Shrier’s book was never meant to be the final word? What if what we really needed was someone willing to slaughter the sacred cows and start a conversation?
If that’s the case, then Shrier’s book is the book we needed, but you should read it for yourself and make your own decision.