Raising Neurotic Wrecks A Review of Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
Martha Dunson
March 18, 2024
Currently at the top of Amazon’s bestseller booklist, Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up tackles one of today’s most pressing issues: [W]ith unprecedented help from mental health experts, we have raised the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless, and fearful generation on record….How did kids raised so gently come to believe that 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? (xvii)
This issue affects everyone: parents, teachers, pastors, coaches, and more. Today’s children are tomorrow’s future. Despite the weighty topic, Bad Therapy is easily readable, full of humor and hope, including clever chapter titles like “Trauma Kings” and “Spare the Rod, Drug the Child.” Bad Therapy is also secular validation of the natural order God created for parents and children and is an encouragement to Christian parents.
Shrier outlines the problem: therapy and therapeutic concepts (“mental health”) are ubiquitous today and parents are quick to find therapeutic solutions for everything, including medicating kids with psychotropic drugs and stimulants to treat normal childhood behaviors. Any pain or disappointment is equated with trauma and, in our risk-averse society, must be avoided at all costs, or treated as a problem to be solved with therapy and drugs. ...
One of the most damning issues Shrier tackles is the bad therapy prevalent in public schools, describing the all-pervasive reach in the public system through social-emotional learning (SEL): therapists and school counselors, paraprofessionals shadowing school children, over-medication for childhood wiggles, and mental health surveys. ...
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American ReformerThis book has gotten a lot of positive press from conservatives, and I'd like to read it.
